Oct 11
lindsayrgwattFood, NYC
Do you have an alcoholic Russian (or Russian-loving friend) who is filthy rich and you’re struggling to find a gift for them? Maybe they own a football or basketball team and already have a chateau in the French countryside. Fortunately, the good folks at Astor Wines understand your challenges and offer Imperial Collection Faberge Egg:
This bit of conspicuous consumption/unnecessary luxury can be your for the astonishingly low price of $2,399.99 (note that they ran out of space for the last ‘9′ in the shot below):
Your oligarch awaits his gift.
Oct 09
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random memory, perception, reality
Last night there were fireworks over the harbour and Wen and I sat on our deck watching them. This morning I went for a run and almost bumped into a shackled prisoner going into the police station around the corner.
When I hit the bottom of Union, the Queen Mary 2 was parked in the cruise ship terminal and was glowing with all its lights turned on in in the pre-dawn light.
Upon my return, our corner had turned into the staging area for a SWAT team raid. Cops in body armour and machine guns prepped their shields and set up a convoy that also included an ambulance and a fire truck.
And now it’s evening. The last wisps of firework smoke drifted away hours ago. The accused has been processed and sent to Rikers. The Queen Mary has sailed and somebody who I’ll never know had one hell of a surprise this morning.
But if you were to visit my apartment today you’d never know that any of this ever happened.
Oct 08
lindsayrgwattNYC freedom
One thing about New Yorkers: they’re not ashamed to tell you what they’re thinking.
On Tuesday night I was at a movie and afterward their was an interview with the director. The interviewer wrapped it up by explaining that everyone was invited to a nearby bar where, “at midnight, to celebrate my birthday, I’ll do a body shot off of my pregnant wife’s belly.” Truly inspiring.
The next night I was at a concert where the singer was performing a Beatles tune. She sang the phrase “the wind is high” and then ad libbed “just like my daddy.” Once again, from nowhere comes more than I arguably needed to know.
It’s so refreshing to live in a city where people just throw it out there and frankly don’t give a sh!t what other people think…
Oct 07
lindsayrgwattScience electric cars, smart grid, variable pricing
There are big ideas and then there are big ideas. Reading this blog entry on Ford’s electric vehicles is mind expanding. Imagine an America with lots of electric cars. Now imagine a smart electric grid with variable pricing. Your car charges at night (when power cheap and interestingly most winds are strong enough). During the day, if it’s plugged in, it’s putting energy back into the grid – and you’re pocketing the difference. That’s a huge idea.
Sep 30
lindsayrgwattRandom change, design thinking, systems
I recently came across the following quote:
A lack of imaginative products and advanced manufacturing was a form of fear that had contributed to the general economic decline. The problems all over the world, were, of course, much large, but one of the solutions was to create consumer demand. Eventually, a few industrial design pioneers were able to make some business leaders aware that this lack of vision and industrial timidity was foreign to the spirit of adventure that had made America a leading nation. And could again.
What’s interesting is that this quote is from the 1930’s (See pgs 33-34 of Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller. I couldn’t help but think that this is very similar to what I hear about today when thinkers like Umair Haque are writing the Awesomeness Manifesto. I’d love to think that a new order of innovative entrepreneurs are going to lead the rebirth of economy.
With that in mind, I went tonight to a conversation between Bruce Nussbaum and Tim Brown (he of Ideo) about design thinking. They made a few interesting points that relate to the point above. Central was the difference between design and analytical thinking. Most of us-especially most business people-are trained as analytical thinkers. They have a fantastic toolkit for making the best decision, given a set of choices. (People like this are really good at figuring out how to reduce costs in business, squeeze more money out of a product, improve a sales force’s efficiency, etc.)
However, design thinking is a set of tools to create new choices. It’s about prototyping ideas and turning them into reality. This is a fundamentally different toolkit that what is needed to pick the best choice amongst existing choices.
And this is where we get stuck. Design thinking is fairly mature as a way to create new products, but our current problems aren’t like the 1930’s where we needed new products. Our challenges today are about needing new systems: healthcare, education, energy policy/global warming – you pick it, it’s a complex system where there’s no one fix needed.
I’m betting that the solution is going to be a mix of the two. People who can analyze systems to determine where the bottlenecks and compromises are, but who also have the creativity to come up with bold solutions (and that aren’t anchored on what they analyzed) and can execute them. Now if we can only figure out how to teach this…
Sep 28
lindsayrgwattHistory, Random Big Sort, politics, Psychology, society
I recently finished reading Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. It’s a “big ideas” book and something of a road map to help you understand why the world (or at least America) is what it is today. The book begins with an insight: the 1976 Presidential election was highly competitive and only 26.8% of Americans lived in a ‘landslide county’ – where the margin of victory was at least 20%. However, in 2004, that number had reached 48.3% (and steadily increased each election from ‘92-’04, despite all of them being competitive).
So why did this happen? Well, a big part is geography. Economic specialization has led geographic segregation. This should scare you as there is substantial evidence that people who are in groups will polarize (see Stanley Schacter, Muzafer Sherif, James Stoner, etc.). There are two reasons why this happens: first, when people spend all their time with a group, they only hear the same ideas and it becomes self-reinforcing. The other is that when you’re in a group, adopting a position a little to the extreme of the group can be a way to ingratiate yourself. A similar slippery slope; this is okay for your Little League, but it’s the stuff wars are fought over when it’s politicians doing so.
In politics, this lack of dialogue is reinforced by how politicians live in Washington. In 1990, Rick Santorum made an issue of the incumbent Congressman’s house – he’d bought a house in DC to keep his family together – and promised that, if elected, he would spend less time in Washington. Now Senators and Congressmen frequently live with other party members and spend so little time in Washington that they don’t socialize (and thereby talk) with their peers in opposite parties.
However, it’s not as simple as that. As the same time as this economic specialization has occurred, there has been a corresponding decrease in the role of traditional American institutions: Elks, marriage, the Presbyterian Church, the daily newspaper, arguably the federal government and the Democratic party (think the New Deal).
In fact, 1965 turns out to be the Annus Horribilus for trust in America. The year started with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid plus many of Johnson’s Great Society programs (the War on Poverty) and the Justice Department ordering desegregation. It saw Bloody Sunday in Selma. The year ended with the escalation of the Vietnam War, the first stirrings of anti-war protests and then the Watts riots. One hell of a year and a massive shock to the system resulting in a massive drop in people’s faith in old institutions.
This shock in 1965 is partially explained by Inglehart’s theory of social change. In the early 1970’s, he proposed that when people grow up in abundance, their social values changed. The 1950’s and ’60’s represented the first time that the mass of Americans grew up middle class-and it had a profound effect on their values. Inglehart predicted that society would transition from being “elite-directed” to being “elite-challenging” and that we would live in a “post-materialist” society where people would lose interesting in traditional religion, become more interested in personal spirituality and people would be more interested in personal freedom, abortion rights, gay right and the environment. He also predicted that folks would vote less but sign more petitions. It’s largely played out that way.
And this is where my beef with The Big Sort begins. After this aggressive hypothesis, the rest of the book falls into a set of stylized facts explaining how we got to today and how it’s represented in society, rather than a discussion of how to live in today’s reality. We learn that geography, more than class or gender, is a better indicator of how you will vote. Labour leaders were pro-Iraq was in Republican counties but against it in Democratic counties. Same for women. We hear that in 2004, 73% of Americans lived in counties where the same political party had been elected since 1992 (not much dialogue there). And there’s a long description of the rise of the Evangelical Right (the origin of Public vs. Private Protestantism, the preacher McGavan [Bridges of God] recognizing that Christianity spreads as a mass movement and this leads to the Saddleback Churches of the world) plus a quaint description of how Applebee’s uses community to fill tables (each Applebee’s has a ‘community wall’ celebrating the history and people of the area; they then eat in groups).
There’s a lot of commentary on how dangerous a situation this is and a thorough description of how it’s emerged, but there’s no guide to the future. There’s not even a whiff of how we might manage our way out of this. A great book, but I’m hoping there’ll be a sequel about what we might do next.
And now for some interesting factoids:
- Democrats may be a little more flexible than Republicans. Between 1995 and 2000, 79% of people who left Republican counties moved to counties that would vote Republican in 2004. However, people who left Democratic counties moved to both Republican and Democratic-voting counties (but not to Republican landslide counties).
- In Ohio in the 1960’s, Michigan’s working class voted solidly Democrat. However, in Ohio they voted Republican (which was arguably against their interests). The explanation is that in Michigan all the workers lived near one another and acted as a block whereas in Ohio they were interspersed with the middle class, who frequently voted Republican. There was no cohesive Ohio working class and no cohesive Democrat machine to get out the vote. This is a prelude to today, where Bishop would argue that economic specialization has led to geographic segregation, which is reflected by more similar people living together (hence the landslide votes).
- The Founding Fathers envisioned the House and Senate as a place for a constant clashing of opinions. In the early years of the Republic, there was talk about whether legislators should be “instructed” by their constituents or if they should represent the local opinions of their constituency but be focused more on what was best for the nation. The national perspective was the winner, but Bishop would argue that the “instructors” are taking back the legislative branch.
- Contact hypothesis: when groups have contact with others, they can learn how to integrate and find middle ground. However, in order to work, the groups must see themselves as equals, the meetings must take place as a pursuit of a shared goal and the meetings must not be artificial.
Sep 27
lindsayrgwattHistory, NYC brochure, Neighbourhoods, tour
People always visit New York and ask me what they should see. I can usually come up with some ideas for everyone, but I’m not really able to provide a comprehensive set of suggestions. However, this weekend at Brooklyn Flea I bought a tour pamphlet, so now people can refer to this blog post.
You can take the “uptown residential tour” which will take you to Grant’s Tomb where you can see “the New George Washington Bridge, with its longest span in the world.” For those keeping track, the bridge hasn’t been “new” since it was dedicated in 1931 and Grant’s Tomb (shown below) is surrounded by a canopy of fully grown trees:
After that, you can head downtown and, amongst other things, watch the shipping in the New York harbour. (The last commercial dock in Manhattan closed in 1987)
But perhaps you want something a little more prurient. Why not take the De Luxe After Dark Tour? You’ll go to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the Bower and the Lower East Side. The Bowery “is a characteristic and historic spot with its endless procession of human wrecks of all ages and from all walks of life.” “The Ghetto” a.k.a. the Lower East Side is “the melting pot where foreigners from all over the world first come into touch with American life.”
If you’re really crazy, you could take the De Luxe Combination Tour: it throws in Harlem. You’ll visit its “conglomeration of night clubs, cabarets, spiritual meetings, jazz and superstition.” Bonus points: on the way back, you’ll “return through the Upper East Side German and Bavarian sections, with its sidewalk cafes, beer gardens and waiters in native Bavarian costumes.”
Ah, to have seen the old New York…
Sep 24
lindsayrgwattBusiness, Technology
There’s a great two-part interview with Marc Andreessen up at the Business Insider (although it’s occasionally painful to watch as their streaming is buggy beyond belief).
Marc talks about Netscape and what he’s learned about creating technology businesses, strategy, etc. Here are a couple of gems:
- Jim Clarke spent four years in the wilderness at Silicon Graphics before he had a product that people actually thought was useful. This helped him mentor Marc while Netscape was in its wilderness period
- Before starting Netscape, Jim & Marc had a variety of ideas, including an idea for XBox Live-but it was 1993 so it couldn’t work.
- When they started Netscape they had two elements that helped them:
- The idea worked: Mosaic as a browser was a research success. They just had to rewrite the code and commercialize it
- They defined their business model (sell servers and commercial browsers; give non-commercial browsers away for free)
- Note that the above basically says “create a great product and then build a company”, not the other way around
- Business plans are useless – but the process of planning is very valuable. It forces you to think critically about your business and show that you understand the issues
- Every tech company starts off doing something different than one it originally planned to do. Microsoft started writing compilers but made money in OS. Apple started with the Apple II but made its money on the Mac. Silicon Graphics started selling computer chips and ended up making supercomputers.
- “There’s not a tension between product and business [in the technology industry] – there’s a staging. You don’t have a business until you have a product – especially a product that lots of people want.” It’s about product/market fit. Make a killer product and then scale up. Marc seriously wants to avoid creating companies that grow to 75 people, go nowhere and everyone just collects a salary.
Marc answered one big question I’ve always wondered: why did AOL buy Netscape? After all, the business tanked immediately after they bought it.
It turns out that AOL never really cared about the business and actually never even bothered to really run the company. They bought the company so that they would be perceived as “the blue chip internet company,” the “GE of the Internet”. It worked – there stock subsequently quadrupled and they were able to buy Time Warner.
Finally, he was asked what three things made him the success that he is. His answers might surprise:
- Luck
- Timing – which he considers luck
- Place – being in Silicon Valley has forced him to be better as he is always surrounded by so many smart people
Here are the videos:
Sep 22
lindsayrgwattHistory, NYC, Technology gis, google earth, maps, nypl, open street maps
I went to the Conflux Festival on Saturday morning and attended a talk by Matt Knutzen entitled Rebuilding the Historical City. Matt’s a cartographer working at the NYPL and he was explaining a new tool they’ve built – and the Very Big Idea behind the tool.
The NYPL has over 60,000 maps of NYC in their Digital Gallery, but they’re simply digitized images. They lack any actual mapping points: latlongs, etc. that can actually be use to project the map onto other maps. As a result, they’ve decided to build a tool – the Map Rectifier – that allows anyone to convert an image of a historical map into an actual working map and share the results with the world.
The process is simple: you find an old map you want to convert into a working map. You put it side by side with an OpenStreetMap map of New York. You then click on a point in the old map and click on a corresponding point in OpenStreetMap. Once you’ve done at least four points, you click “rectify” and the system warps the image of the old map to fit it onto the real map. At this point, the old map is converted into a set of latitude and longitudes and can be used elsewhere (the system is also smart enough to tell you if you did a bad job). I’d show you screen shots, but I can’t get a login to the system; it’s still in invite only mode 
There’s some other cool functionality in the tool: it’s got the ability to crop maps (so you can skip parts of the map) and you can also trace out buildings and add data about them (e.g., it’s a public house, etc.).
This gets better and better because once you’ve converted the map into a set of KML coordinates and you can view it in Google Earth. For example, here’s a projection of a 1924 aerial set of photos vs. what’s there today (a lot more farmland back then):
Here’s another example, from the 20th Ward’s fire insurance map. You can see what Madison Square looked like before the Garden and the Farley post office were built:
This technology is impressive as you can start to tell and visualize the history of the city. Moreover, once the system launches, it’s going to be open to the public and anyone can rectify a map (that’s a sea change in how libraries work). Also, kudos to the NYPL for making the entire system open source: you’ll be able to install the software on your own server and start rectifying your own maps.
Sep 19
lindsayrgwattUncategorized street art, subway
One of the little joys of living in my neighbourhood is watching the subway ads get defaced. If it was just a matter of people tagging the ads, I’d consider it vandalism, but the locals have turned it into an art form (I think there are some very creative but underemployed folks in my hood who are quite bored waiting for their morning commute to Manhattan. Perhaps a hint of social deviance as well).
Below is a scene from earlier today. Our local artist carved out the baby’s smile and found that it was perfectly overlaid above a row of teeth below. There is an artistry of sorts lurking here.
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