Closer To The Ideal

Please come and read my new weblog, The Smash Company.

Why am I moving to a new weblog? TeamLaLaLa was a joint venture between myself and Laura Denyes. For several years we built web sites for a great diversity of clients. Nowadays, Laura has mostly re-focused on her true love, which is photography. I am hoping to move away from client work and focus more on building my own websites. That is, I believe my future is more about being an entrepreneur. As such, I think it is time for a new blog, to mark the new era. Therefore, I will not be posting here anymore. Please come and read my new weblog, The Smash Company.

Interesting:

He disappeared briefly, then 45 seconds later, he reappeared at my elbow. “Right this way,” he announced, and led us to a table. I had jumped a 50-person line and saved myself an hour-and-a-half wait. Forget Frank Sinatra. I was now James Bond.

Increasingly, I was struck by how much impact the experience was having on me. Surmounting this challenge night after night was actually giving me a certain self-assurance, a feeling of having grown up. Some might find this disillusioning: “You mean life is not first-come, first-served?” I found I had a different reaction: “You mean all it takes to crack one of New York’s most daunting thresholds is fifty bucks?” Even if I chose not to do it on a regular basis, just knowing how doable it is brought the whole puffery of New York restaurants into perspective. Bribing, it turns out, has as much effect on the briber as it does on the bribee.

A few nights later, the effect of this newfound glow became clear. I walked into Le Cirque 2000, the gilt-edged establishment on the East Side. “Sorry,” I was told. “We don’t have a table tonight.” No problem, I thought. I took a step back and tried to identify the person in power. Seconds later, a gentleman in a tuxedo approached. “We were wondering if you had a table for two?” I said, clutching a bill in my pocket…but not handing it over. He bowed. “Your table is ready,” he said, and led us into the dining room.

This was a new benchmark: I had bluffed my way in. Just by being prepared to bribe, I had achieved my goal. Was there some change in my appearance? Was I swaggering a bit or walking a little taller? Perhaps. A couple of days later, I bluffed my way into Aureole.

Despite my luck, I knew I had saved the hardest places for last. Union Square Cafe has, according to the Zagat Survey, been New York’s “most popular restaurant for four years running.”

“You’ll be eating at McDonald’s tonight,” a friend said.

When I arrived at 8:30, the gentleman in charge said, “We can seat you in an hour.” I told him my name, took a few steps back, waited for him to step away, then approached and slipped him a $50 bill. “This is a very important night for me,” I whispered, and waited for the rebuff. To my surprise, the man seemed positively giddy. “No problem, sir,” he said, clenching the bill with boyish abandon. “I’ll check right now.” Ten minutes later we were shown to a corner table in the back. The deed had been done with such effortlessness, such quotidian blaséness, that my friend was nonplussed.“It feels so normal,” she said.

By this point, with the quick addition of Daniel, where $50 got me bumped up from the lounge to the dining room in 30 seconds, I had demystified the act. I had learned a new skill. I had gained ten pounds. And I seemed to be breeding followers: One friend called for advice on how to “tip” her super; another friend announced she had slipped a twenty to a clerk at the Charlotte airport. Also, people were bribing me to take them out to dinner.

I first saw this on Hacker News

Interesting:

Americans long ago consigned world’s fairs to the toy box of history. Once celebrated as showcases of world cultures and windows into the future, these grand expositions lost their glamour sometime during the Johnson administration. Like Space Food Sticks and Jonny Quest, they are fondly remembered — at least by those over 50 — but a bit ridiculous: all that ethnocentricism, naive internationalism, and technological good cheer. The last one to warrant much attention was Montreal’s Expo ’67, from which the now-defunct baseball team took its name. (Sorry, Seville ’92.) Our cynical culture is done with world’s fairs.

Not so for Shanghai, where Expo 2010 opened on May 1 and runs through October. In its first two months, the Shanghai Expo attracted more than 20 million visitors, mostly from China itself. Spanning more than 1,300 acres on both sides of the Huangpu River, the fair is an ubiquitous presence throughout the city. Public gardens reproduce the logo in white flowers, subway-car TVs broadcast upbeat interviews with exhibitors and tourists, huge LED screens on downtown buildings play promotional videos, and street vendors hawk knockoffs of its squat, blue, Gumby-like mascot. Visiting Shanghai in May, I quickly discovered that the Chinese authorities haven’t lost their zeal for propaganda. They’ve just changed their colors from revolutionary red to Expo green.

Taking place in a society that is both authoritarian and rapidly developing, the Shanghai Expo highlights the double-edged allure of world’s fairs, which are both deceptive and inspiring. The Expo’s cheery boosterism and sanitized reality match Lawrence R. Samuel’s description of the 1964 New York World’s Fair in The End of the Innocence: a “protective cocoon” where “foreign nations sang in harmony, corporations existed to produce things that made life better, and, most important, the future looked brighter than ever.” Like all glamorous objects, the ’64 fair was an illusion. Yet its optimistic spirit, and those of other fondly remembered world’s fairs, fostered attitudes that often did produce real progress. “For the tens of millions of kids who went,” writes Samuel, who was one of them, the fair “planted a seed of the possibility to achieve great things.”

The Worlds Fair of 1939 had a big impact on my dad.

Regarding Andy Grove’s call for economic reform:

However, this is the same guy that once lobbied vehemently for H1B Visas to allow more foreign workers (often working for much lower wages) into the U.S. to fill high-tech job openings. It’s also the same Andy Grove who was almost anti-idealistic in the past. He once stated, “Technology happens. It’s not good, it’s not bad. Is steel good or bad?”

Now, he’s suggesting that businesses have a “responsibility” to the society and communities that germinate them, and that part of that responsibility involves employing as many of its citizens as possible in the valuable work of the corporation. Make no mistake, he also believes it is imperative for the future success of the company itself to have closer control over its manufacturing processes. But, at its heart, Grove’s message is one of altruism and civic responsibility as much as economic incentive. And maybe that’s what’s most appealing about it — especially in an age of soulless robot CEOs who speak in nothing but platitudes and cliches.

Contrast the message of Grove with the reign of former HP CEO Mark Hurd, who decimated and demoralized his workforce at HP in order to maximize profits, and was almost universally praised for it by Wall Street bankers.

That said, I have my doubts about Grove’s recommendations. Altucher is right. Protectionism has rarely ever worked for any economy, not in the long run. In fact, it has typically caused more harm than good when viewed in retrospect. And, that’s when looking at economies hundreds of years ago that moved at a comparative snail’s pace. In today’s highly-connected global economy, protectionism is even less reasonable.

But didn’t protectionism work well for the US all during the 1800s? And didn’t protectionism work well for England as it became the most powerful nation on Earth during the 1700s? What was Adam Smith complaining about, in 1776, when he wrote of Mercantilism? At the time, England was the most mercantilist nation on Earth, and also the most successful. And didn’t protectionism work well for Japan, Korea and China during recent decades? It seems like one could easily write a very long list of nations that got rich via protectionism.

Interesting:

Call me crazy, but it seems that there is a large influx of Ruby programmers exploring the Clojure programming language. Based on the results of Chas Emerick’s great State of Clojure – Summer 2010 survey, 17% of surveyed Clojure users come from a Ruby background. Based on observed trends, I expect that percentage to grow in the next round. But why?

..The existence of the Lisp feedback loop has lured Ruby programmers in much the same way that Lisp lured them into Ruby in the first place. That is, Ruby programmers being the adventurous lot to begin with, are not satisfied with “halfway to Lisp”. Instead, they want it all. That’s not to say that I think (nor wish) Ruby programmers will abandon ship and run arms-wide to Clojure. Instead, I think that our industry can support both in a complementary relationship modeled (just to name one such scenario) much like the inner workings of FlightCaster. I already see a similar path in Clojure as previously observed in Ruby5. That is, Clojure seems to be used in applications already built on cutting edge technologies (as noted by Chas in his survey results post mentioned in the beginning). Is it really too much to suppose that this environment might also appeal to the Rubyist?

Interesting:

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: “How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?” The man behind this question was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and, by most accounts, the founding father of the whole management business.

Taylor was forty-three years old and on contract with the Bethlehem Steel Company when the pig iron question hit him. Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as laborers loaded ninety-two-pound bars onto rail cars. There were 80,000 tons’ worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American War. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste there, he was certain. After hastily reviewing the books at company headquarters, he estimated that the men were currently loading iron at the rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day.

…One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results. Yet Taylor never published the data on which his pig iron or other conclusions were based. When Carl Barth, one of his devotees, took over the work at Bethlehem Steel, he found Taylor’s data to be unusable. Another, even more fundamental feature of science—here I invoke the ghost of Karl Popper—is that it must produce falsifiable propositions. Insofar as Taylor limited his concern to prosaic activities such as lifting bars onto rail cars, he did produce propositions that were falsifiable—and, indeed, were often falsified. But whenever he raised his sights to management in general, he seemed capable only of soaring platitudes. At the end of the day his “method” amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!

The trouble with such claims isn’t that they are all wrong. It’s that they are too true. When a congressman asked him if his methods were open to misuse, Taylor replied, No. If management has the right state of mind, his methods will always lead to the correct result. Unfortunately, Taylor was right about that. Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies).

Curiously, Taylor and his college men often appeared to float free from the kind of accountability that they demanded from everybody else. Others might have been asked, for example: Did Bethlehem’s profits increase as a result of their work? Taylor, however, rarely addressed the question head-on. With good reason. Bethlehem fired him in 1901 and threw out his various systems. Yet this evident vacuum of concrete results did not stop Taylor from repeating his parables as he preached the doctrine of efficiency to countless audiences across the country.

In the management literature these days, Taylorism is presented, if at all, as a chapter of ancient history, a weird episode about an odd man with a stopwatch who appeared on the scene sometime after Columbus discovered the New World. Over the past century Taylor’s successors have developed a powerful battery of statistical methods and analytical approaches to business problems. And yet the world of management remains deeply Taylorist in its foundations.

At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it. The managerial revolution must be counted as part of the great widening of economic opportunity that has contributed so much to our prosperity. But, insofar as it pretends to a kind of esoteric certitude to which it is not entitled, management theory betrays the ideals on which it was founded.

Interesting:

This classic “Innovator’s dilemma” definitely applies to HP. But something else has hamstrung its ability to innovate in high-end storage, a market HP has been a leader in for many years.

And it’s correlated to former CEO Mark Hurd’s recent firing. Word on the street is Hurd wasn’t let go for his affair or even for his embellishment of trivial expense reports. Instead the board kicked him out because his employee approval rating was absolutely atrocious.

And the reason employees hated him is because he traded short-run profits for long-term innovation by laying off entire design teams and killing HP’s R&D budget—take a look at this chart and compare HP to Cisco and IBM, both storage leaders.

In this way, I believe acquiring 3PAR is actually the beginning of a secular trend for HP in using M&A to “make good” on the company’s lack of organic innovation.

Yes that’s right, believe it or not, the real reason why HP’s board is obsessed with 3PAR is closely correlated to Hurd’s departure—divisions like HP’s storage group simply haven’t kept pace with peers. I used to sell to HP’s storage groups (as well as Dell and 3PAR) and have plenty of friends who tell me that projects have been canned and innovation has languished.

Interesting:

The language of business is about winners and losers. Bosses who read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” as a guide to business strategy or “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” are unlikely to create a culture of collaboration.

There are implicit rules of competition and collaboration in companies. It’s not that anyone is hiding a secret rulebook; it’s just that no one has articulated the rules.

In most companies men set these rules. Again, nothing secret here, but men don’t realize that they behave and think differently. They don’t have to explain the rules to other men so it never occurs to them to explain the rules to women.

As women, they will be expected to perform to boys rules as defined in their workplace: This means they need to spend the time understanding what the rules are in their company and industry. If they don’t, they will find others less competent but more adept at playing the game getting promoted instead of them.

Women can be equally competitive if they desire. It’s not a question of competency. Or a skill only boys have. If they want to succeed by competing they can. They just have to learn the rules and practice them.

I first saw this on Hacker News.

Some organizations are unwilling to promote their female executives. Sometimes they lost their female executives to other corporations, or other life options. So some smart companies are trying to figure out new ways of promoting high potential female candidates.

Good sponsorship requires a set of skills and sensibilities that most companies’ star executives do not necessarily possess. When you layer on top some of the complexities of sponsor relationships between senior men and junior women, you easily have a recipe for misunderstanding. The strategies and tactics that helped the men progress in their careers may not be appealing or even feasible for the women.

A classic case is the challenge of developing a credible leadership style in a context where most of the successful role models are male. One of the women in our research describes the problem like this: “My mentor advised me that I should pay more attention to my strategic influencing skills…but often he suggests I do things that totally contradict my personality.” The behavioral styles that are most valued in traditionally masculine cultures—and most used as indicators of “potential”—are often unappealing or unnatural for high-potential women, whose sense of authenticity can feel violated by the tacit leadership requirements.

A further complexity is the famed “double bind” examined in Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli’s book Through the Labyrinth (Harvard Business Review Press, 2007) and in the 2007 Catalyst research report “The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership.” Here’s the problem, in short: The assertive, authoritative, dominant behaviors that people associate with leadership are frequently deemed less attractive in women. Male mentors who have never faced this dilemma themselves may be hard-pressed to provide useful advice. As one of our interview participants describes, even well-intended mentors have trouble helping women navigate the fine line between being “not aggressive enough” or “lacking in presence” and being “too aggressive” or “too controlling.” She explains the challenge of dealing with conflicting expectations from two different bosses:

“My old boss told me, ‘If you want to move up, you have to change your style. You are too brutal, too demanding, too tough, too clear, and not participative enough.’ My new boss is different: He drives performance, values speed. Now I am told, ‘You have to be more demanding.’ I was really working on being more indirect, but now I will try to combine the best of both.”

4 things that leaders can not to give to a group, even though the group demands it.

Absolutely clear expectations about everything. Expectation-setting sounds good as a leadership principle but is difficult in practice, especially when leaders try to tell people about things they haven’t yet encountered and do not yet have the experience to comprehend. No matter how much leaders try to define expectations, lay out the nature of likely events, or describe the steps that the group will be going through, it’s not enough. As the work unfolds, leaders are likely to hear, “Why didn’t you tell us X, Y, or Z?” Even when leaders pull out the opening memo with X, Y, and Z spelled out in detail, some people deny that they received it. All leaders can do is strive to be thorough, to communicate repeatedly, and to document the flow of events.

Perfect certainty about the future. A related demand some groups make is that everything should be known in advance and unfold without variation. Yet, even the best plans, with alternative scenarios and multiple contingencies, still fall prey to unanticipated events. My favorite unfortunate example is the volcanic ash that disrupted Europe in April; who would have built that unlikely event into their project or program plans? But knowing that certainty isn’t possible, groups still crave it, especially when the task or situation arouses anxiety. Leaders sometimes feel forced to announce schedules knowing that they could slip or other activities interfere. A better tactic is to acknowledge that there are always unknowns and to offer a different kind of security in the form of regular updates and honest communication about what decisions will be made when.

Yes all the time. Leaders are the linchpins linking their groups to the wider organization, marketplace, or community. When leaders do this well, they protect the group from intrusions by the surrounding systems so that the group members can focus on their work. As leaders patrol the boundaries, however, they also need to maintain them. Group members tend to look inward, not seeing the constraints flowing from the wider system. They often push to get more of what they want, regardless. Thus, leaders who want to be highly positive and supportive still find themselves having to say “No.” Empowerment doesn’t mean stepping aside and abdicating responsibility. Leaders must excercise good judgment about what is appropriate, even if that makes some group members uncomfortable.

The ending at the beginning. This wish is an impossible fantasy. When groups finish their tasks or experiences on a highly positive note, members often say that later experiences should have been offered earlier — that they would have been able to do their work even more effectively if things that happened at the end had happened at the beginning. Adjustments are always possible, of course, and smart leaders listen to the feedback. But some of this is just about the effect of time. As groups mature, they are better able to respond to experiences that would have fallen flat at the beginning.

A comparison of the ways men and women suffer:

Likewise, I mentioned the salary difference, but it may have less to do with ability than motivation. High salaries come from working super-long hours. Workaholics are mostly men. (There are some women, just not as many as men.) One study counted that over 80% of the people who work 50-hour weeks are men.

I find this odd. I’ve read repeatedly that if you count the hours spent on house work, women, on average, work longer hours than men. Many women work a paid job for 30 or 40 or 50 hours a week, and put in another 15 to 25 hours of work at home, cooking, cleaning and, in general, taking care of the family and the house. The book The Second Shift looks at this in more detail.

Then there is this very odd bit of reasoning:

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women. In principle, I agree. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don’t see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds.

As near as I can understand the reasoning, the argument is that the unequal treatment of women should be compared to the degree that men suffer. I think the implication is that the one cancels the other out, that is, since both groups are, at times, subject to injustice, neither group’s injustice needs to be taken quite as seriously. The reasoning seems somewhat pointless – even if it were true, why should anyone care? It seems to me the goal of a decent society is to strive toward less injustice. The reality of injustice in the past should not be used as an excuse to keep people from moving toward a society that, we can hope, will be less unjust.

This is kind of funny:

One of the major reasons for a shortage of skilled labor is the problem of ambition. Too few young people who could become welders and fitters view the positions as desirable. As a result, they do not acquire the skills, either because they reach the white-collar workforce or fail and join the bottom of the workforce. According to the report, to deal with this issue business and government need to provide incentives to pursue these kinds of skilled labor positions and obtain the necessary training.

What kind of incentives should the business or the government offer? I’d like to suggest cash. If people do not want jobs, that means the jobs are not offering enough money. Simple as that.

I’ve lived most of my life without schedules, so I have trouble relating to this:

That is what scares me the most about this job. Like most people, I have lived an entire lifetime conforming to schedules. They exist like the Greek gods: you didn’t ask for them but they are there, there is no negotiating with them, and prolonged association means you are likely to get your dignity violated by a bovine.

But schedules are structure, and structure helps. Be at school at nine AM. Seminar starts at 10:30, do not be late. Work starts at nine, Patrick, waltzing in at ten annoys people even if you are contractually permitted to do it and even if you will still be here at 2 AM. (Regardless of start time. If you thought the gods were rational, you have been reading the wrong mythology.)

At the very least, schedules put you and everyone else on the same page as to what you should be doing. Gainfully employed young men should be working at 2 PM on a Wednesday. I was having a late lunch and reading a novel at the coffee shop. The waitress asked me, confused, whether I was a student or not. Students have social license to do bugger all for a few years prior to working for a living. I told her I run a software company, and one of the perks is that I get to have lunch whenever. She was impressed, but asked how my customers and employees stand that.

…

I know that to be true for AR because code isn’t getting written, but I always think it to be true for BCC. It turns out that I am smoking something: I ran a shell script to compare my productivity (commits, A/B tests, etc) prior and post quitting. I thought it would show me spinning my wheels. Turns out I am getting more done than ever. This is normally the point where I would paste a graph but, sorry, iPad. Suffice it to say I have run more A/B tests this summer than in the last year. (Interesting finding of today: Google Checkout really does increase conversion rates over having only Paypal as an option. I strongly suspected that, but now I know.)

Sales are up, too. Why doesn’t it feel this way? I think after a couple of decades of living by the clock I have become habituated to measuring my productivity that way. Insane and irrational, I know.

I am looking for ways to hack this: the discipline and social validation of having a schedule, without actually having to work at nine. I have been considering getting an office just to have mental separation between work and non work. (They give them away in this town if you work in tech. I could pay the rent with the savings in my iced cocoa budget.) Plus, if I have an office, I have an offsetting factor the next time I am accused of being unemployed. Sounds funny until it happens from a police officer who does not quite understand immigration statuses. (You know that controversial immigration policy in Arizona? Don’t ask me my opinions about it around sharp implements. Suffice it to say I can vividly imagine what getting stopped under it will feel like.)

Interesting:

Women’s careers tend to stall out in upper-middle management and female executives need the support and sponsorship of C-suite men if they are to stand a chance of climbing the highest rungs of the corporate ladder. Sad to say, in the wake of the Hurd ouster, sponsorship is going to be in even shorter supply. However tangled the Hurd/Fisher narrative becomes, a large proportion of male leaders who read the story will have one and only one takeaway: “Poor guy was fired for dining alone with a junior woman. No one is even alleging a sexual relationship. How crazy is that! It makes me want to avoid ever being alone with a younger female colleague.” So said one C-suite male I talked to.

All of which puts a crimp on sponsorship, a relationship which requires a senior executive to “use up chips” to help a high potential mid-level executive gain visibility, win plum assignments, and eventually get promoted. To take on a protégée — a serious commitment — a sponsor needs to get to know the candidate well and spend a significant time one-on-one (possibly even having dinner!) in order to assess his or her potential and decide whether he or she is worth backing.

Research out this fall from the Center for Work-Life Policy shows sponsorship to be the critical promotional lever for women in the marzipan layer, the layer just below the top layer of management. No matter how high achieving, an upper middle-level female executive will fail to find career traction unless she is sponsored by a powerful senior executive — who, more often than not, is male and married.

Which is where sex enters the picture. Consider some data from the CWLP study: Thirty-four percent of executive women who participated in the survey that underlies the new study claim that they know a female colleague who has had an affair with the boss. (Indeed 15% of women at the director level or above admitted to having had such an affair themselves!) They also perceive that these liaisons sometimes yield a payoff: of those who know of an illicit affair, 37% claim that the woman involved received a career boost as a consequence.

Despite this apparent upside for individual women, illicit sexual liaisons often backfire and wreak serious damage in the workplace. For example, they are hugely demoralizing for teams. The CWLP data show that 61% of men and 70% of women lose respect for a leader involved in an affair. Most poisonous of all, when a junior woman is having a sexual dalliance with the boss, 60% of male executives and 65% of female executives suspect that salary hikes and plum assignments are being traded for sexual favors. This can have a disastrous effect on morale and productivity. Forty-eight percent of men and 56% of women feel animosity towards the involved couple, and 39% of men and 37% of women see a fall off in productivity as the team splinters. Talk about collateral damage!

The Freakanomics writers look at prostitution. They post a reminder about the economic hardships women face:

Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralisation and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men. Even though men handled most of the warfare, hunting and brute-force labour, women had a shorter life expectancy.

Women have finally overtaken men in life expectancy, thanks mainly to medical improvements surrounding childbirth; and, especially in the world’s developed nations, women’s lives have improved dramatically. There is no comparing the prospects of a girl in 21st-century America or Britain or Japan with her counterpart from a century or two ago. In any arena you look — education, legal and voting rights, career opportunities and so on — it is far better to be a woman today than at any other point in history.

And yet there is still a considerable economic price to pay for being a woman. The economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that women who went to Harvard earned less than half as much as the average Harvard man. Even when the analysis included only full-time employees and was controlled for other variables, Goldin and Katz found that the Harvard women still earned about 30% less.

Then they track a few years in the life of a woman named Allie, who leads an affluent life, but finally decides to leave the business:

Allie has never had any trouble with the police, and doesn’t expect to. The truth is that she would be distraught if prostitution were legalised, because her stratospherically high wage stems from the fact that the service she provides cannot be had legally.

Allie was a shrewd entrepreneur who kept her overheads low, maintained quality control, learnt to price-discriminate, and understood well the market forces of supply and demand. She also enjoyed her work.

But, all that said, Allie began looking for an exit strategy. She was in her early thirties by now and, while still attractive, she understood that her commodity was perishable. She felt sorry for older prostitutes who, like ageing athletes, didn’t know when to quit.

She had also grown tired of living a secret life. Her family and friends didn’t know she was a prostitute, and the constant deception wore her out. The only people with whom she could be unguarded were other girls in the business, and they weren’t her closest friends.

She had saved money but not enough to retire. So she began casting about for her next career. She got her real-estate licence. The housing boom was in full swing, and it seemed pretty simple to make the transition out of her old job and into the new, since both allowed a flexible schedule. But too many other people had the same idea. And Allie was aghast when she realised she’d have to give half of her commission to the agency that employed her. That was a steeper cut than any pimp would dare take!

2002-2005 was a fertile time for web frameworks. Django and Rails both grew up then. I was working on my own, in PHP. Eventually PHP got some good frameworks like Symfony (The world of PHP is always slow to get the best ideas, which always seem to be developed elsewhere).

Simon Willison writes:

Django started when Adrian Holovaty and I were working together for a year at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper back in 2003-2004.

I was there on a year long internship (my UK university offered the chance to work abroad). Adrian had already created Lawrence.com using PHP, and I had about 5 years of PHP experience. Both of us were fed up with trying to maintain large sites in PHP (this was before namespaces, PHP5 etc so it might be better now, but at the time it started to drag once you got above a certain size of codebase). We had both fallen in love with Python, probably thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python book.

We wanted to switch to doing web development in Python, but we both had very strong opinions about how web development should work – thinks like the importance of well designed URLs, and making good use of CSS (back in 2004 the Web Standards movement was still a relatively new thing).

We looked at the existing set of Python tools for web development, but none of them fitted the way we wanted to work. We also looked in to Python deployment options and found that the best bet appeared to be mod_python.

Hiding information in plain site:

When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.

Privacy in a public age

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about logs and exponential growth. Now I need to re-learn so I’ve been looking for examples on the web. I stumbled across a semi-incoherent question about exponential growth, followed by a reasonable reply. Perhaps surprisingly, I found this helpful. I’m posting the link here mostly so I can find it again later.

In the US, according to FBI statistics, women killed as many husbands and boyfriends as men killed wives and girlfriends, up until the 1970s. During the 1970s divorce laws were liberalized and domestic violence shelters got built, so women suddenly had more ways of getting out of a bad relationship. Since then the rate at which women murder their intimates has fallen beneath the rate at which men murder their intimates.

I am surprised by this article in New York Times, about domestic violence in Cambodia, where an incident of attempted murder apparently leads to domestic peace.

TRAPAENG VENG, Cambodia — Touch Eap stroked her husband’s scarred and discolored back as she described the night six years ago when she poured a tub of acid over his head, burning off his eyes and ears and lips and leaving him as dependent on her as a child.

An acid burn victim had her blood pressure checked at the Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity while recovering from a skin grafting operation.

“I wanted to kill him,” she said. “I didn’t want to injure him. He said he would kill me, and I thought, better to kill him first so that I can take care of the children.”

She smiled ruefully as she talked; his drunkenness and threats were an old memory. Her husband, Phoeung Phoeur, 45, opened his mouth in what may also have been a smile.

“I’m sorry for him,” said Ms. Touch Eap, 46, who grows vegetables to support her husband and three children, “and I try to take care of him.”

…It was battery acid that Ms. Touch Eap said she poured over her husband’s head as he sat drinking in their home six years ago, a large knife by his side.

“ ‘Do what I say or I’ll kill you’ — those were the last words I said to her,” said Mr. Phoeung Phoeur, joining his wife in the narrative as their 13-year-old daughter, Per Srey Ai, looked on.

If he was going to live, Mr. Phoeung Phoeur said, he realized he needed his wife. As soon as he reached the hospital, he begged a friend to pay the police to set her free. Ms. Touch Eap returned to him, and she has nursed and supported her husband ever since she tried to kill him.

She was with him at the hospital when doctors told him he had only hours left to live, and she walked alongside him as neighbors carried him home in a hammock to die. She lighted incense and prayed beside him as he slipped in and out of consciousness until, defying the doctors’ predictions, he returned to life.

“We called all the family around him,” she said, remembering that dark evening. “We were all waiting around him, waiting for him to die. I was so afraid he was going to die.”

Paul Graham wrote a post about what startups need. It is a few years old, but it is brilliant and I think timeless. Here are a few quotes that jumped out at me:

A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you’ll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.

Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft’s original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn’t occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

…What you should do in college is work on your own projects. Hackers should do this even if they don’t plan to start startups, because it’s the only real way to learn how to program. In some cases you may collaborate with other students, and this is the best way to get to know good hackers. The project may even grow into a startup. But once again, I wouldn’t aim too directly at either target. Don’t force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.

…If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA. [3]

…So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers. [4]

They’re the more strategically valuable part of the market anyway. In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.

It’s very dangerous to let anyone fly under you.

…We talked to a number of VCs, but eventually we ended up financing our startup entirely with angel money. The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the deal. That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what if he wanted to have a say in running the company? That would have led to disaster, because our software was so complex. We were a company whose whole m.o. was to win through better technology. The strategic decisions were mostly decisions about technology, and we didn’t need any help with those.

…We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in retrospect it was a good thing. The founders all learned to do every job in the company. As well as writing software, I had to do sales and customer support. At sales I was not very good. I was persistent, but I didn’t have the smoothness of a good salesman. My message to potential customers was: you’d be stupid not to sell online, and if you sell online you’d be stupid to use anyone else’s software. Both statements were true, but that’s not the way to convince people.

I was great at customer support though. Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product, but would apologize abjectly if there was a bug, and then fix it immediately, while you were on the phone with them. Customers loved us. And we loved them, because when you’re growing slow by word of mouth, your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they’ll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they’ll pay you.

We officially launched in early 1996. By the end of that year we had about 70 users. Since this was the era of “get big fast,” I worried about how small and obscure we were. But in fact we were doing exactly the right thing. Once you get big (in users or employees) it gets hard to change your product. That year was effectively a laboratory for improving our software. By the end of it, we were so far ahead of our competitors that they never had a hope of catching up. And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users, we understood online commerce way better than anyone else.

…When you’re looking for space for a startup, don’t feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I’d advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?

Besides being cheaper and better to work in, apartments tend to be in better locations than office buildings. And for a startup location is very important. The key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them. So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that’s a wasteland after 6:00 PM. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you’ve lost something extraordinarily valuable. God help you if you actually start in that mode.

…So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.

… The other cutoff, 38, has a lot more play in it. One reason I put it there is that I don’t think many people have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week. I don’t know if I could do that now.

Also, startups are a big risk financially. If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke. By 38 you can’t take so many risks– especially if you have kids.

My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing– though in that case it probably won’t take four years.

During this time you’ll do little but work, because when you’re not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend’s house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked.

Interesting:

Humans also have TRIM5a, but while the human version of TRIM5a protects against some viruses, it does not protect against HIV.

Researchers hope to turn TRIM5a into an effective therapeutic agent. But first they need to identify the components in TRIM5a that enable the protein to destroy viruses. “Scientists have been trying to develop antiviral therapies for only about 75 years,” Campbell said. “Evolution has been playing this game for millions of years, and it has identified a point of intervention that we still know very little about.”

TRIM5a consists of nearly 500 amino acid subunits. Loyola researchers have identified six 6 individual amino acids, located in a previously little-studied region of the TRIM5a protein, that are critical in the ability of the protein to inhibit viral infection. When these amino acids were altered in human cells, TRIM5a lost its ability to block HIV-1 infection. (The research was done on cell cultures; no rhesus monkeys were used in the study.)

By continuing to narrow their search, researchers hope to identify an amino acid, or combination of amino acids, that enable TRIM5a to destroy HIV. Once these critical amino acids are identified, it might be possible to genetically engineer TRIM5a to make it more effective in humans. Moreover, a better understanding of the underlying mechanism of action might enable the development of drugs that mimic TRIM5a action, Campbell said.

In their research, scientists used Loyola’s wide-field “deconvolution” microscope to observe how the amino acids they identified altered the behavior of TRIM5a. They attached fluorescent proteins to TRIM5a to, in effect, make it glow. In current studies, researchers are fluorescently labeling individual HIV viruses and measuring the microscopic interactions between HIV and TRIM5a.

“The motto of our lab is one of Yogi Berra’s sayings — ‘You can see a lot just by looking,’” Campbell said.

Another post about the fact that dreaming your startup will be the next Google is delusional:

I personally find the people who are in the software startup game just for the money to often be nearly delusional about their chances of success and the likely magnitude of it when it happens. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. If you are in it for the money and you aren’t a founder, you’re sticking your head in the sand. Full stop. Yes, you can point at your anecdotal evidence at once-per-generation companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. But for the most part, employees never get “I never have to work again” rich doing startups. There are too many mechanics out there to make sure that the folks taking the real risks (investors and founders) make the real money. If you want to read more, read my intro to startup stock options. If you don’t want to start companies, focus on salary and how much you enjoy working at startups.

But even if you are a founder, don’t do it for the money. Do it because you love small teams. Do it because you love your product. Do it because you love playing the startup game (even if you don’t win it). But for the love of God, don’t do it because you think you’ll get rich and retire on a beach somewhere when you’re 30. Because, as crazy as it sounds, when you sell your first company it almost certainly isn’t going to happen.

You can not out-maneuver over-confidence. Financial officers consistently misread the market.

In that paper, three financial economists — Itzhak Ben-David of Ohio State University and John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey of Duke — found that chief financial officers of major American corporations are not very good at forecasting the future. The authors’ investigation used a quarterly survey of C.F.O.’s that Duke has been running since 2001. Among other things, the C.F.O.’s were asked about their expectations for the return of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for the next year — both their best guess and their 80 percent confidence limit. This means that in the example above, there would be a 10 percent chance that the return would be higher than the upper bound, and a 10 percent chance that it would be less than the lower one.

It turns out that C.F.O.’s, as a group, display terrible calibration. The actual market return over the next year fell between their 80 percent confidence limits only a third of the time, so these executives weren’t particularly good at forecasting the stock market. In fact, their predictions were negatively correlated with actual returns. For example, in the survey conducted on Feb. 26, 2009, the C.F.O.’s made their most pessimistic predictions, expecting a market return of just 2.0 percent, with a lower bound of minus 10.2 percent. In fact, the market soared 42.6 percent over the next year.

It may be neither troubling nor surprising that C.F.O.’s can’t accurately predict the stock market’s path. If they could, they’d be running hedge funds and making billions. What is troubling, though, is that as a group, many of these executives apparently don’t realize that they lack forecasting ability. And, just as important, they don’t seem to be aware of how volatile the market can be, even in “normal” times.

This is the most ruthless take down of any corporation I have ever read. I do not think I have ever read a story about even an evil company like Enron that was as damning as this. Once again I am impressed with the ability of the team at the blog of OK Cupid to put together facts and follow the implications out to the logical conclusions:

Finally, in the spirit of “don’t take my word for it”, here’s how eHarmony and Match.com themselves show that their sites don’t work.

This is from Match’s 2009 presskit:

Okay, Match is double counting to get “12 couples”, since a couple that gets married also gets engaged. So we have 6 couples per day getting married on the site, or 4,380 people a year. Let’s round up to 5,000, to keep things simple. My first observation is that Match.com made $342,600,000 last year5. That’s $137,000 in user fees per marriage.

Now here’s where the demographics get really ugly for them.

It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t subscribe to Match.com.

I figured it out like so:

Remember this is the minimum ratio, because from Match’s perspective, we’ve made a lot of very favorable assumptions along the way. And it also doesn’t matter that some portion of Match’s customer base is overseas, because however you account for that in their subscriber base, you also have to adjust their marriage total accordingly.

Leoville accidentally turned off all Buzz posts, and after 16 days, no one noticed, not even him:

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

Thank God the content I deem most important, my Internet and broadcast radio shows, still stand. I believe in what I’m doing there, and have been very fortunate to have found an audience. I’m pretty sure I would have heard from people if there had been 16 days of dead silence there. Hell, if we miss one show I get hundreds of emails. But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too.

Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.

Interesting:

The story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes.

For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill.

Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as “a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.” True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites—the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s.

At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.

The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa’ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where “the entire surface is meaningful” and “every part is both construction and ornament.” A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant “mashrabiya,” the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.

I’ve already explained how my great grand mother made Warren Buffet rich. I am now waiting for other people to make me rich in the same way. The time to get into the stock market is when other people get out. What I need is a few million more blog posts like this one, telling people to get out of the market:

When capital is so cheap that everyone with a pulse thinks they can make money once they borrow it, the stock market is in trouble.

Remember the rule about first there are the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots ? It is why the stock market is truly in trouble.

There is SO MUCH CAPITAL available at so little cost to so many that the timeline from innovator to idiot is measured in days, hours and probably even milliseconds. The guys who are actually smart and uncover new opportunities can’t even get in a position large enough to make it worth their while before the imitators and then idiots pile in right behind them.

Remember the Flash Crash and the discussion about how trades are made in milliseconds, what I called hacking the system ? I don’t know for certain, but Im willing to bet that those innovators that made money by trading in milliseconds, now have so many imitators and idiots that have piled in behind them , putting servers right next to theirs and hiring their algorithm coders away from them, that there is no longer any advantage, or not enough of one for any of the players to make any real money.

There is so much capital chasing so little return that big time players are getting out of the business.

So what does this mean for you ?

It means that I don’t know if the market will go up or down, or by how much. My guess is that it stays in a trading range for a while. There isn’t much money coming in, but enough of that easy to come by capital has so much ego attached to it, that the same people will get in and out of the market over and over again and trade amongst themselves.

Until something happens. What that will be, I have no idea.

But I do know that I have continued to add to my cash balance or sovereign debt from around the world (that I have owned for a while now and has been profitable and is very, very liquid.) The stocks I still own for the most part pay me a nice cash on cash return, or I have owned them for a long, long time and have more in gains than I want to pay taxes on. But in total, I have been a net seller of stocks for more than a year. The only investments I am making are small buys into private companies. I want as much “powder dry ” as possible for when something happens.

I’ve worked at startups where we were desperate for money all the time. When I was working for Bluewall in the early part of last decade, the owner would go out and sell our software, but the clients always wanted more features than what we had. We had developed a custom CMS that was built with PHP and MySql, similar to WordPress, however, the owner was desperate for money, so he would sell the software to customers who wanted features we did not have. I recall him coming back from a meeting and he’d be thrilled because he had made a sale but: “All we have to do is add in the ability to parse an Excel worksheet and turn all the data into pie and bar charts. I told them we could deliver this in 2 weeks.” I would then work 120 hours over the next 2 weeks to add the new features and fit the software into whatever design the customer wanted.

For awhile, it seemed like this might work as a model – we get customers, add more features, charge them money, and slowly the software would have more and more features. If the owner of Bluewall had been able to negotiate enough money, this might have worked. As it was, the deadlines were always very short, so I often had to sacrifice the cleanness of the code for the sake of getting done on time. The owner would often claim that after we were done with the next customer there would be time to clean up the code, but such an era of cleanup never arrived. He was always out of money, and he always needed the next customer to write a check, fast, and that meant I needed to write new features, fast.

Around 2006 I began to wonder if we should switch to something open source, like WordPress. In 2008 I finally gave up on the CMS that I’d been working on since 2001, and I started using Symfony for all of my projects.

All of which leaves me sympathetic, when I read this:

Finally, payment was received, but on the condition that we’d still fix a few small things in the software. The customer would like to show the toolpath on the screen in a graphical way during the design phase. This seemed an easy enough fix but in fact was tremendously hard. The reason why is not obvious if you’ve never worked with a lathe, but the ‘point’ that a lathe cuts with is not actually a point but a small circle. So to produce a given work piece you have to do something called radius compensation. This means that you’re going to have to offset the shape of the object you are creating by the radius of the toolbit and then move the toolbit along that expanded shape with the centerpoint of the circle. Tricky stuff. Mathematically it’s trivial if your program is vector based, but this program was based around a pre-computed array of steps by now (to make it fast enough) and then it suddenly is a non-trivial problem. Eventually that was solved as well (more re-work), I learned quite a bit about ‘programming for the future’ in that period.

Little by little our ’simple’ program started to get bigger, and what looked like a month or two of development time actually became closer to a year. The final program was 50,000 lines of GFA basic code (fortunately GFA basic at least allowed structured programming) and another 10,000 lines of assembly. I was still working my crazy hours during all this time and didn’t know what date it was or even what month.

Several other people were brought in, all on the promise of receiving a piece of equity (4), a guy called Simon that worked practically day and night to build the machines and who brought along a bunch of money because he’d just sold his store, and a guy called Rinus (Freds former partner) who was a production welder and a machinist.

The pattern that we got in to was this: Fred would go to some prospect, demo the machine (which had been built in to a small van), find out that the customer needed features X, Y and Z which the software did not provide, get a signature and a down-payment based on the promise that these features would be in the machine on the delivery date and would go back home to tell us what we needed to do (7). Typically the delivery time was ‘next week’ and the new feature required either some more IO or a hardware change or had to be researched, built, integrated in to the GUI and tested.

…Financially our situation went from bad to worse and finally Fred mortgaged his house-boat in order to be able to continue the company.

This money was used to do two things, the first was that we made a batch of 10 machines in one go, instead of the one-by-one approach that we’d taken so far, and he reserved a spot on the annual metal working trade show in Utrecht.

We got our spot right next to the top-of-the-line brand Okuma. Their stand was absolutely empty, people were walking out with aluminum chess pieces and stars in their eyes about what our tiny little game computer driven machine could do.

A sales guy was hired, and almost immediately fired again, he sued the company and won, taking a very large chunk of our cash reserves with him. Some big shot from a large company was brought in to ‘manage’ the company better, his first decision was to order an expensive air conditioning for his office even though we were almost broke. (5)

A lot of people ordered a machine and it looked like we were going to do well. If only life was that easy. The customers that had signed up during the trade-show had a completely different level of expectation than the people we’d been working with to that date. These were big shops, doing very serious work. And they did not cut us any slack when it came to fixing problems, if it wasn’t working on par with the competition on the day of delivery there was real trouble.

…At this point it grew over my head, I’d been working for well over a year at an unbelievable pressure level. At Freds house things were not all that rosy either, his wife tried to torch their boat, and nearly succeeded. Round about this time my wife left me, and she was completely right about doing so. I’d been working day and night for almost as long as we’d been together by then thinking that I might get us out of the financial hole we were in if only I worked just a bit harder.

It came to a head one night around 23:30, I really couldn’t see the screen before my eyes any more and I just simply wanted to go home and sleep. The next day there would be some customer coming the ‘feature’ that had been promised was a lot harder than Fred thought when he promised that it would be done (this usually was the case) and he flipped and chased me through the shop with a chunk of steel calling me disloyal and un-trusthworthy.

There will probably come a day, in the distant future, when we can read proteins like we can now read software code, and therefore we will be free to write any new code (proteins) that we want. On that day, a whole new universe becomes possible for us. Sadly, that day is far away.

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven’t even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil’s clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!

Let me give you a few specific examples of just how wrong Kurzweil’s calculations are. Here are a few proteins that I plucked at random from the NIH database; all play a role in the human brain.

First up is RHEB (Ras Homolog Enriched in Brain). It’s a small protein, only 184 amino acids, which Kurzweil pretends can be reduced to about 12 bytes of code in his simulation. Here’s the short description.

MTOR (FRAP1; 601231) integrates protein translation with cellular nutrient status and growth signals through its participation in 2 biochemically and functionally distinct protein complexes, MTORC1 and MTORC2. MTORC1 is sensitive to rapamycin and signals downstream to activate protein translation, whereas MTORC2 is resistant to rapamycin and signals upstream to activate AKT (see 164730). The GTPase RHEB is a proximal activator of MTORC1 and translation initiation. It has the opposite effect on MTORC2, producing inhibition of the upstream AKT pathway (Mavrakis et al., 2008).

Got that? You can’t understand RHEB until you understand how it interacts with three other proteins, and how it fits into a complex regulatory pathway. Is that trivially deducible from the structure of the protein? No. It had to be worked out operationally, by doing experiments to modulate one protein and measure what happened to others. If you read deeper into the description, you discover that the overall effect of RHEB is to modulate cell proliferation in a tightly controlled quantitative way. You aren’t going to be able to simulate a whole brain until you know precisely and in complete detail exactly how this one protein works.

And it’s not just the one. It’s all of the proteins. Here’s another: FABP7 (Fatty Acid Binding Protein 7). This one is only 132 amino acids long, so Kurzweil would compress it to 8 bytes. What does it do?

Anthony et al. (2005) identified a Cbf1 (147183)-binding site in the promoter of the mouse Blbp gene. They found that this binding site was essential for all Blbp transcription in radial glial cells during central nervous system (CNS) development. Blbp expression was also significantly reduced in the forebrains of mice lacking the Notch1 (190198) and Notch3 (600276) receptors. Anthony et al. (2005) concluded that Blbp is a CNS-specific Notch target gene and suggested that Blbp mediates some aspects of Notch signaling in radial glial cells during development.

Again, what we know of its function is experimentally determined, not calculated from the sequence. It would be wonderful to be able to take a sequence, plug it into a computer, and have it spit back a quantitative assessment of all of its interactions with other proteins, but we can’t do that, and even if we could, it wouldn’t answer all the questions we’d have about its function, because we’d also need to know the state of all of the proteins in the cell, and the state of all of the proteins in adjacent cells, and the state of global and local signaling proteins in the environment. It’s an insanely complicated situation, and Kurzweil thinks he can reduce it to a triviality.

The program was initially focused on getting young women to stay in school, but as an experiment, a control group was also given money. The control group and the experimental group both had the same result: a large decrease in the HIV rate.

[The] Malawi program gave girls ages 13 to 22 and their parents as much as $15 each month if the girls attended school regularly. A control group, however, didn’t get any cash reward for schooling. In total, the study enrolled 3,796 never-married schoolgirls in Zomba, a district in southern Malawi. A year later … more schoolgirls receiving cash (95%) stayed in school than the control group (89%).

But there’s a surprise finding: 18 months after the program began in January 2008, biomarker data show that HIV infection rates among girls who received cash was 1.2% versus the control group’s 3%. This translates to 60% lower prevalence. Girls in the cash group also had a lower infection rate of herpes simplex virus type 2, the common cause of genital herpes (0.7% vs. 3%). Those findings hold even for a third group of girls who got cash without any schooling or other strings attached.

How did it happen? The key seems to be an “income effect” on the sexual behaviors of young women receiving cash payments. A year after the program started, girls who received payments not only had less sex, but when they did, they tended to choose safer partners, says Berk Özler, a senior economist at the Development Research Group who conducted the study with Sarah Baird of George Washington University and Craig McIntosh at the University of California, San Diego. In fact, the infection rate among those partners is estimated to be half of that of partners of the control group.

The cash transfers may have led to a drop in the so-called “transactional sex.” At the beginning of the study, a quarter of sexually-active participants said they started relationships because they “needed his assistance” or “wanted gifts/money.” Meanwhile, among the sexually-active schoolgirls in the control group, 90% said they received an average of US$6.50 a month in gifts or cash from their partners. Such “gifts” are significant, given the country’s GDP per capita was $287.5 in 2008.