commonplace book

Library book returned 92 years late

commonplace book, history / /

From AP’s “Borrowed books returned to museum — 92 years later” (CNN: 6 November 2000):

The Field Museum of Natural History recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New York — 92 years late.

It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when he accepted a job at the Field Museum in 1908. American Museum officials suspect anthropologist Bertholt Laufer was using the books for research when he was hired away. …

Laufer had purchased 500 volumes — including texts on medicine and natural history — for the American Museum during an archaeological expedition to China from 1901 to 1904.

The American Museum didn’t even know 10 of the books — each belonging to a larger set — were missing until it decided in 1990 to computerize its collection.

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Vitruvian Triad terminology

commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From “Good Architecture“:

In ‘building architecture’, for comparison, we have the 3 classic Vitruvian qualities to which ‘GoodArchitecture’ aspires:

‘Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas’ (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ‘The Ten Books of Architecture’ 1st C AD).

These qualities may be translated as: ‘Technology, Function and Form’ (C St J Wilson ‘ArchitecturalReflections?; Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture’ 1992 ISBN 0-7506-1283-5

or, in the slightly more familiar but antique: ‘Firmness, Commodity & Delight’

— MartinNoutch

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Wynton Marsalis on recognizing your place

business, commonplace book / /

From Sam Dillon’s “Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center” (The New York Times: 11 June 2006):

Wynton Marsalis

Musician

[Delivering commencement to] The Juilliard School

Realize that integrity is real, and so is starvation. Never let pay and the talk of pay occupy more time and space than the talk of your art. If you find that it is, go into banking or start a hedge fund or something.

Also, about pay, understand where you are. When I was 19, I was on a tour with Herbie Hancock and I started complaining to him before we walked onstage about what I was being paid. I said, “When am I being paid?”

He said: “Come here, man. Look out into the audience.” He said, “Now, do you see those people?”

I said, “Yes sir.”

He said: “They paid for these tickets. If you don’t walk out of here, how many of them are going to leave? Now, if I don’t walk out, how many will leave? That’s why you’re being paid what you’re being paid.”

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The way to trick smart people

commonplace book, language & literature, politics, science, security, technology / /

From Paul’s “The easiest way to fool smart people“:

There’s a saying among con-men that smart people are easier targets, because they don’t think they can be conned.

I’m not sure if that’s true, but there’s one scam that’s almost guaranteed to make smart people switch off their brains and reach for their wallets. It’s a trick that’s used so pervasively in our culture, that once you become aware of it, you start to see it everywhere. …

Most smart people have a hidden weakness and it’s this – they’re absolute suckers for anything that sounds clever.

As soon as you start hitting people with technical terms, fancy graphs, famous names and the like, you’ll immediately increase your credibility. If they’re smart, they’re even more likely to find themselves nodding in agreement. Many intelligent people would rather cut off a finger than admit they don’t know what you’re talking about. …

Even better, they can pretend to be teaching their audience something important. A person who was previously completely ignorant about quantum physics now feels as if they understand something about it – even if that something is absolute baloney. The audience have been fed ideas they’ll now defend even against someone who’s a real expert in that subject. Nobody likes to be told that something they’ve been led to believe is wrong. …

Consultants behave this way because they know that’s how to get a sale. Bombard people with clever-sounding stuff they don’t really understand, and they’ll assume that you’re some kind of genius. It’s a great way of making money.

Stock analysts, economic forecasters, management consultants, futurologists, investment advisors and so on use this tactic all the time. It’s their chief marketing strategy for the simple reason that it works.

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TV signals passing through the Stone Age air

commonplace book, technology / /

From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):

The gift-dropping missions had ended in 1996. There was still no television set on North Sentinel; it remained, like Prospero’s island, a place where the air shimmered with invisible signals, with unseen Hindi soap operas and Thai music that drifted, unheard, across the Andaman Sea.

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Lost tribe hoaxes

commonplace book, history, technology / /

From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):

Even so, every few years there is a report of one “lost tribe” or another – usually in the Amazon rain forest or the highlands of New Guinea – staggering naked from the jungle into the dazzling glare of modernity. Such stories are almost invariably followed by a retraction: the tribesmen turn out to have T-shirts and cigarettes stashed back in their huts, and the original report turns out to have been a mistake or a fraud. (The most famous such incident was the so-called Tasaday hoax of 1971, involving a supposed Stone Age tribe in the Philippines; the tribesmen were Filipino farmers whom local politicians had coerced into posing as naked cave-men for the camera crews from CBS and National Geographic.)

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How to travel to the most isolated human settlement on earth

commonplace book, cool stuff / /

From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):

This is how you get to the most isolated human settlement on earth [North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman Islands]: You board an evening flight at JFK for Heathrow, Air India 112, a plane full of elegant sari-clad women, London-bound businessmen, hippie backpackers. You settle in to watch a movie (a romantic comedy in which Harrison Ford and Anne Heche get stranded on a desert island) and after a quick nap you are in London.

Then you catch another plane. You read yesterday’s Times while flying above the corrugated gullies of eastern Turkey, watch a Hindi musical somewhere over Iran. That night, and for the week that follows, you are in New Delhi, where the smog lies on the ground like mustard gas, and where one day you see an elephant – an elephant! – in the midst of downtown traffic.

From New Delhi you go by train to Calcutta, where you must wait for a ship. And you must wait for a ticket. There are endless lines at the shipping company office, and jostling, and passing back and forth of black-and-white photographs in triplicate and hundred-rupee notes and stacks of documents interleaved with Sapphire brand carbon paper. Next you are on the ship, a big Polish-built steamer crawling with cockroaches. The steamer passes all manner of scenery: slim and fragile riverboats like craft from a pharaoh’s tomb; broad-beamed, lateen-rigged Homeric merchantmen. You watch the sun set into the Bay of Bengal, play cards with some Swedish backpackers, and take in the shipboard video programming, which consists of the complete works of Macaulay Culkin, subtitled in Arabic. On the morning of the sixth day your ship sails into a wide, sheltered bay – steaming jungles off the port bow, a taxi-crowded jetty to starboard – and you have arrived in the Andamans, at Port Blair.

In Port Blair you board a bus, finding a seat beneath a wall-mounted loudspeaker blaring a Hindi cover of “The Macarena Song.” The bus rumbles through the bustling market town, past barefoot men peddling betel nut, past a billboard for the local computer-training school (“I want to become the 21st century’s computer professional”). On the western outskirts you see a sawmill that is turning the Andaman forests into pencils on behalf of a company in Madras, and you see the airport, where workmen are busy extending the runway – out into a field where water buffalo graze – so that in a few years, big jetliners will be able to land here, bringing tour groups direct from Bangkok and Singapore A little farther on, you pass rice paddies, and patches of jungle, and the Water Sports Training Centre, and thatched huts, and family-planning posters, and satellite dishes craning skyward.

And then, within an hour’s time, you are at the ocean again, and on a very clear day you will see [North Sentinel] island in the distance, a slight disturbance of the horizon.

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How to grade or judge water

commonplace book / /

From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):

On the tables in front of us are pink “trial” judging sheets. Across the top run a series of boxes for water numbers, and down the side is the set of criteria we’ll be using. Arthur goes through the criteria one by one, and explains what to look for.

The first criterion is Appearance, which is rated on a scale from zero to five. Good is colorless; bad is cloudy. Self-explanatory, so Arthur moves along quickly to Odor, which is also based on five possible points. The box on the sheet has one example of a positive descriptor on the left side—in this case, “none”—and a row of possible characterizations of water odor on the right side: chlorine, plastic, sulfur, chemical, musty. Next on the list is Flavor, rated out of ten points; the left side of the box reads “clean” and the right side has the identical list of identifiers provided for Odor, plus “salty.” Mouthfeel is back down to a five-point criterion, and the relevant distinction is “refreshing/stale.” There’s a five-point box for Aftertaste (this one on a spectrum from “thirst-quenching” to “residue”), and finally we come to Overall Impressions.

Overall Impressions is scored out of fourteen points, which makes the total available points for each entrant an eyebrow-raising forty-nine. The fourteen-point scale is provided to us on an attached sheet. It was developed by a food scientist at UC Berkeley named William Bruvold. In the ’60s, he pioneered experiments in the acceptability levels of total dissolved solids in water, and he used his students as subjects; he incrementally increased the turbidity of the sample until the water came to resemble Turkish coffee and his students refused to drink it. Out of these experiments came this scale, which Arthur tantalizingly referred to the day I met him in Santa Barbara. Arthur seems a bit sheepish about the language of the document.

The fourteen-point scale, in its entirety, reads exactly as follows (all formatting original):

1. This water has a TERRIBLE, STRONG TASTE. I can’t stand it in my mouth.

2. This water has a TERRIBLE TASTE. I would never drink it.

3. This water has a REAL BAD TASTE. I don’t think I would ever drink it.

4. This water has a REAL BAD TASTE. I would drink it only in a serious emergency.

5. This water has a BAD TASTE. I could not accept it as my everyday drinking water, but I could drink it in an emergency.

6. This water has a BAD TASTE. I don’t think I could accept it as my everyday drinking water.

7. This water has a FAIRLY BAD TASTE. I think I could accept it as my everyday drinking water.

8. This water has a MILD BAD TASTE. I could accept it as my everyday drinking water.

9. This water has an OFF TASTE. I could accept it as my everyday drinking water.

10. This water seems to have a MILD OFF TASTE. I would be satisfied to have it as my everyday drinking water.

11. This water seems to have a LITTLE TASTE. I would be satisfied to have it as my everyday drinking water.

12. This water has NO SPECIAL TASTE at all. I would be happy to have it for my everyday drinking water.

13. This water TASTES GOOD. I would be happy to have it for my everyday drinking water.

14. This water tastes REAL GOOD. I would be very happy to have it for my everyday drinking water.

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Smallest state park in the USA

commonplace book, history, politics / /

From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):

Anywhere else, the four and a half acres of muddy, flat grass cross-hatched by asphalt paths and crowned by a green-pink-and-white gazebo would be the town park. Here in Berkeley Springs[, West Virginia], population 663, “the country’s first spa,” it is a state park. It is, in fact, the smallest state park in the nation. Along the embankment on the west side of the park is a camp of low-slung yellow-brick buildings that house the Berkeley Springs, font of the town’s hydrocentric entertainments. Besides the springs, the town’s attractions include antique malls, craft shops, acupuncturists, and a homeopathy museum.

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The 80/20 rule

business, commonplace book / /

From F. John Reh’s “How the 80/20 rule can help you be more effective” (About.com):

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran inaccurately attributed the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, calling it Pareto’s Principle. …

Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph Juran, working in the US in the 1930s and 40s recognized a universal principle he called the “vital few and trivial many” and reduced it to writing. …

As a result, Dr. Juran’s observation of the “vital few and trivial many”, the principle that 20 percent of something always are responsible for 80 percent of the results, became known as Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule. …

The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many(80 percent) are trivial. In Pareto’s case it meant 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran’s initial work he identified 20 percent of the defects causing 80 percent of the problems. Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of your time and resources. You can apply the 80/20 Rule to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world.

You know 20 percent of you stock takes up 80 percent of your warehouse space and that 80 percent of your stock comes from 20 percent of your suppliers. Also 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your sales staff. 20 percent of your staff will cause 80 percent of your problems, but another 20 percent of your staff will provide 80 percent of your production. It works both ways.

The value of the Pareto Principle for a manager is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results.

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Kaspar Hauser

commonplace book, history, language & literature, weird / /

From Damn Interesting’s “Feral Children“:

One of the more mysterious cases is that of Kaspar Hauser, who was discovered in Nuremberg, Germany in 1828. He was unsteady on his feet, held a letter for a man he had never met, and only spoke the phrase “I want to be a horseman like my father is.” The letter was addressed to the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th cavalry regiment:

Honored Captain,

I send you a lad who wishes to serve his king in the Army. He was brought to me on October 7th, 1812. I am but a poor laborer with children of my own to rear. His mother asked me to bring up the boy, and so I thought I would rear him as my own son. Since then, I have never let him go one step outside the house, so no one knows where he was reared. He, himself, does not know the name of the place or where it is.

You may question him, Honoured Captain, but he will not be able to tell you where I live. I brought him out at night. He cannot find his way back. He has not a penny, for I have nothing myself. If you do not keep him, you must strike him dead or hang him.

Kaspar was about sixteen years old, but he behaved like a small child. At first, when a mirror was handed to him he would look behind it trying to find the person behind the mirror, and he burned his hand while touching a candle’s flame in curiosity. Kaspar had excellent night vision and a keen sense of smell. He detested meat and alcohol, and was offended by the smell of flowers. Unlike many of the other cases described here, Kaspar did learn much over time, eventually learning to speak enough to describe the small cage in which he had been raised, and the mysterious keeper who finally released him outside of town. But about five years after appearing from nowhere, Kaspar was assassinated. The reason for his murder might be because some believed he was the missing heir to the throne of Baden. His assassin lured him away under the pretense that they would reveal who his parents were, and stabbed him fatally in the chest. The mystery of his early life and violent death has never been satisfactorily answered.

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Clarabell the Clown’s final – and only – words

commonplace book, history / /

From The New York Times‘ “Lew Anderson, 84, Clarabell the Clown and a Bandleader, Dies“:

Lew Anderson, whose considerable success as a musician, arranger and bandleader paled before the celebrity he achieved as Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody’s sidekick on one of television’s first children’s shows, died on Sunday in Hawthorne, N.Y. …

“Well, his feet are big, his tummy’s stout, but we could never do without,” Buffalo Bob Smith and the Kids of the Peanut Gallery sang in appreciation of his character, in a baggy, striped costume, who communicated by honking a horn for yes and no, Harpo Marx style.

Other times, Clarabell the Clown made his feelings known by spraying Buffalo Bob with seltzer, or playing a trick on him that everybody but Bob figured out immediately.

Before there was Big Bird, Barney or SpongeBob, there was Howdy Doody and his friends in Doodyville. Baby boomers grew up with “The Howdy Doody Show,” which began in December 1947 at a time when only 20,000 homes in the country had television sets. It was the first network weekday children’s show, the first to last more than 1,000 episodes and NBC’s first regularly scheduled show to be broadcast in color.

When it ended on Sept. 24, 1960, after 2,243 episodes, it was Clarabell who had the show’s last words. Since until then he had only honked, they were also his first words.

The camera moved in for a close-up of Mr. Anderson, who had a visible tear in his eye. A drum roll grew louder and then died. With quivering lips, Clarabell whispered, “Goodbye, kids.” …

In the late 1940’s, he joined the Honey Dreamers, a singing group that appeared on radio and early television shows like “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The group appeared on a musical variety television show Mr. Smith produced for NBC.

When the Clarabell part opened up on Mr. Smith’s other show, “Howdy Doody,” Mr. Smith and the other producers asked Mr. Anderson if he could juggle. “No.” Dance? “No.” Magic tricks? “No.” What can you do? “Nothing.”

“Perfect, you start tomorrow,” Mr. Smith said.

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One of the benefits of LASIK eye surgery

commonplace book, overheard / /

A few weeks ago I had my eyes fixed with LASIK eye surgery. So far I’ve been completely happy with the results – it works! In preparing for the surgery, you receive lots of printed materials to read, including a booklet titled “Patient Information”. Inside that booklet is an explanation of the surgery which contains one of the best sentences I’ve read in quite a while:

The corneal tissue has natural bonding qualities that allow effective healing without the use of stitches.

Well, gee, that’s good to know! I’d hate to have stitches in my eyeball!

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Human life & wasted time

commonplace book / /

From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:

We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don’t believe in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of.

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Brin’s Transparent Society explained, briefly

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Big Brother Logs On“:

In his 1998 book The Transparent Society, which is well known in the privacy advocacy community, science fiction author and technology watcher David Brin argues that society inevitably will have to choose between two versions of ubiquitous surveillance: in one, only the rich and powerful use and control the system to their own advantage; in the second, more democratic future, the watchers can also be watched. Brin concedes that the latter version would mean everybody’s laundry hung out in public view, but the transparency would at least be mutual. Rent a porn video and your wife knows it; but if she drives to your best buddy’s house four times a week while you’re at the office, you’ll know that also.

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Fundamentalism as limited reading

commonplace book, religion / /

From Douglas Rushkoff’s “Faith = Illness: Why I’ve had it with religious tolerance“:

When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual – a community event or an excuse to get together and not work – it doesn’t really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped. …

As I’ve always understood them, and as I try to convey them in my comic book, the stories in the Bible are less significant because they happened at some moment in history than because their underlying dynamics seem to be happening in all moments. We are all Cain, struggling with our feelings about a sibling who seems to be more blessed than we are. We are always escaping the enslaved mentality of Egypt and the idolatry we practiced there. We are all Mordechai, bristling against the pressure to bow in subservience to our bosses.

But true believers don’t have this freedom. Whether it’s because they need the Bible to prove a real estate claim in the Middle East, because they don’t know how to relate something that didn’t really happen, or because they require the threat of an angry super-being who sees all in order behave like good children, true believers – what we now call fundamentalists – are not in a position to appreciate the truth and beauty of the Holy Scriptures. No, the multi-dimensional document we call the Bible is not available to them because, for them, all those stories have to be accepted as historical truth.

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The value of Group-Forming Networks

commonplace book, social software, technology / /

From David P. Reed’s “That Sneaky Exponential – Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building“:

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, is known for pointing out that the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. This scaling law, along with Moore’s Law, is widely credited as the stimulus that has driven the stunning growth of Internet connectivity. Because Metcalfe’s law implies value grows faster than does the (linear) number of a network’s access points, merely interconnecting two independent networks creates value that substantially exceeds the original value of the unconnected networks. …

But many kinds of value are created within networks. While many kinds of value grow proportionally to network size and some grow proportionally to the square of network size, I’ve discovered that some network structures create total value that can scale even faster than that. Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe’s square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs. …

What kind of value are we talking about, when we say the value of a network scales as some function of size? The answer is the value of potential connectivity for transactions. That is, for any particular access point (user), what is the number of different access points (users) that can be connected or reached for a transaction when the need arises. …

The value of potential connectivity is the value of the set of optional transactions that are afforded by the system or network. …

Metcalfe’s law, simply derived, says that if you build a network so that any customer can choose to transact with any other customer, the number of potential connections each of the N customers can make is (N-1), giving a total number of potential connections as N(N-1) or N2-N. Assuming each potential connection is worth as much as any other, the value to each user depends on the total size of the network, and the total value of potential connectivity scales much faster than the size of the network, proportional to N2. …

In networks like the Internet, Group Forming Networks (GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. A GFN has functionality that directly enables and supports affiliations (such as interest groups, clubs, meetings, communities) among subsets of its customers. Group tools and technologies (also called community tools) such as user-defined mailing lists, chat rooms, discussion groups, buddy lists, team rooms, trading rooms, user groups, market makers, and auction hosts, all have a common theme—they allow small or large groups of network users to coalesce and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal. Sadly, the traditional telephone and broadcast/cable network frameworks provide no support for groups. …

What we see, then, is that there are really at least three categories of value that networks can provide: the linear value of services that are aimed at individual users, the “square” value from facilitating transactions, and exponential value from facilitating group affiliations. What’s important is that the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases. Whether the growth is by incremental customer additions, or by transparent interconnection, scale growth tends to support new categories of killer apps, and thus new competitive games. …

What’s important in a network changes as the network scale shifts. In a network dominated by linear connectivity value growth, “content is king.” That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods). Where Metcalfe’s Law dominates, transactions become central. The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) are king. And where the GFN law dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.). …

I’d like to close with a speculative thought. As Francis Fukuyama argues in his book Trust, there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which he defines culturally as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations. There is a clear synergy between the sociability that Fukuyama discusses and the technology and tools that support GFNs-both are structural supports for association. As the scale of interaction grows more global via the Internet, isn’t it possible that a combination of social capital and GFN capital will drive prosperity to those who recognize the value of network structures that support free and responsible association for common purposes?

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