I’m a firm believer in the very human responsibility of hacking one’s own way out of stupidity. Natural talent is a myth, an excuse of sheer sloth, or a repressive cultural tool to punish under-achievers and create a virtual caste system. That means I also despise the age myth, that we become so naturally incapacitated with age that we can’t do things like learn new languages, musical instruments, etc. Somehow mushy infant brains are more accommodating…excuses. Ever pay attention to how long it takes children to learn how to speak their native language properly? Maybe 10 years (properly), and they have 24×7 tutoring going on. Is that impressive? Whatever, kid.
There’s no evidence that (talented people) have a different brain structure or different wiring than the rest of us initially, although we do know that becoming an expert in anything — like chess or race-car driving or journalism — does change the brain and creates circuitry that’s more efficient at doing what you’re an expert at.
Note that this does not mean that everyone can perfect their dance moves in the same amount of time. If you are a slow learner, I implore you to practice in private.
Business 2.0 on the rising ad revenue generated by blogs. Uh, perhaps it’s time to start my own celebrity gossip blog, you know, give the people what they want and all that.
- Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year.
- And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property.
- With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it’s certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs.
- Denton won’t discuss financial details, but industry experts estimate that Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue this year. Gawker Media’s average CPM is between $8 and $10; CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.
- His authors range from tech-oriented guys like Arrington and Om Malik, who writes about telecom on GigaOm and just left his full-time gig with Business 2.0, to Heather Armstrong, whose deeply personal Dooce site is bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably. Her enterprise has a staff of two: Armstrong and her husband.
Have you heard the latest counter-intuitive myth buster? A hybrid automobile will expend more energy, from conception to retirement, than a Hummer. This is apparently for several reasons, the most important being the extra energy costs for the design and development of the new technology found in hybrids, and shorter lifespans the cars are assumed to have at this point.
… the dust-to-dust energy cost of the bunny-sized Honda Civic hybrid is $3.238 per mile. This is quite a bit more than the $1.949 per mile that the elephantine Hummer costs.
Egad, could it be that environmental smugness has finally and unintentionally burned itself in the hell-fires of irony? Not so fast.
The problem with Dalmia’s Op-ed, and many other irresponsible misrepresentations of the very ambitious CNW report: “Dust to Dust”, are that today’s costs, aren’t necessarily tomorrow’s costs, and Spinello himself admits that hybrids will probably be more “dust to dust” energy efficient than their non-hybrid counterparts in a relatively short time, as short as a few years, as the technology is simplified and the manufacturing process is streamlined. (Check out that podcast for a good overview of the report’s conclusions.) New technology is always more costly early in it’s development.
A problem I think with the study itself is that it fails to take into account the comparative R&D costs already sunk in the development of the internal combustion engine, years ago. So add the life cycle of the technology in question itself to the total tally and perhaps we would get a better picture of realistic “energy costs.” Problem is, you can’t. The internal combustion engine’s life cycle isn’t over yet and the hybrid life cycle just begun. Hence the defining boundaries of the “dust to dust” concept itself remain ambiguous enough to render this approach somewhat problematic.
However, the CNW report is interesting in that it forces one to think beyond the simple window of ownership, for a true representation of the energy cost in the life cycle of a product. And while I’m the first to rally behind a good myth buster, the only myth busted here probably won’t be a myth tomorrow.
Atlanta’s own Criminal Records is mentioned in the NYT piece on struggling independent record stores.
Some independent owners are resisting the demographic challenges. Eric Levin, 36, who owns three Criminal Records stores in Atlanta and oversees a trade group called the Alliance of Independent Media Stores, representing 30 shops nationally, said that businesses losing young customers are “dinosaurs” that have done nothing to cater to the new generation. Around the country, he said, shops like Grimey’s in Nashville, Shake It Records in Cincinnati and Other Music in New York are hanging on to young customers by evolving into one-stop hipster emporiums. Besides selling obscure CD’s and even vinyl records, many have diversified into comic books, Japanese robot toys and clothing. Some have opened adjoining nightclubs or, in Mr. Levin’s case, coffee shops.
“Kids don’t have to go to the record store like earlier generations,” Mr. Levin said. “You have to make them want to. You have to make it an event.”
He’s got the right idea. Criminal hosts in store performances, and they now own Aurora coffee next door, which also has art openings and music events. And it’s no secret that while fewer and fewer people may come to a record store to purchase music, they may come for a magazine, or a Kiss doll, or an Anime DVD, or just a chai latte. Offer the kids a cool “environment” that is also a “store,” and chances are when they come to hang out, they’ll leave with something purchased. That rule being kids + pocket money = purchase.
If you upgrade to WordPress 2.0.3 save yourself some time and immediately install this plugin to fix a number of bugs in 2.0.3. Or just don’t install 2.0.3. Pretty weak release.
This gets me all geek in the knees:
A new brand of music maestro is turning programming into performance, eschewing turntables for a compiler and a mind for syntax structure. “Livecoding” practitioners improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.
I’ve been playing Google’s calendar, and it’s so damn fun. Never has the organization of things I won’t do and birthdays I will be sure to miss been slicker. But the most interesting thing about “gCal” is the public calendar feature. On the left hand side of the page, at the very bottom there is a “search public calendars” box. Try it out. Search for “atlanta” or something. Once added, each public calendar has a separate color so you get a nice color coded view of different events. You can also import a friends gCal or enter the iCal address of any public calendar, under “Public Calendar Access.” Check out the “Holiday Calendars” to add all sorts of religious or international calendars.
I made an important discovery while playing around with the holiday calendars. I added the Jewish Calendar and the Islamic Calendar and realized the Jews have a ridiculous number of holidays, enough to make any other religion jealous. I propose that all religions have the same number of holidays. Only then will we see peace in the Middle East.
New NLW in the works: the Riot Slimer. Slime that makes people fall down? Boring! It’s just not sexy enough. My own patent pending “Ibiza Techno-BubbleBox,” looks like an innocuous 80′s style boom-box but will cover a small intersection of hooligans in ecstasy laced foam bubbles, and then kick-out relentless beach party summer hits. See, you can’t just make people fall down…you have to coax them into forgetting their intentions.
A couple of weeks ago I pondered the issue of data backup, particularly interested in home RAID and NAS solutions, and the few of the online storage startups that have recently surfaced. The main caveats to online storage in the next few years will be capacity and speed. If you have a media library at home that you actually want to use you are going to go with a home networked product like NAS. But if you just want to backup data, digital pictures, writings, recordings, etc. then online storage is the way to go. That way when your house burns down your data is still intact. Turns out (duh) that Google is already looking in that direction (what direction aren’t they looking in?). Privacy issues will always be a concern, yadda yadda, but what you can count on is that Gdrive will kick ass when it is released.
What are you storing your 1′s and 0′s on? I’ve got simple mirroring (RAID 1) going on in the primary home computer but long for a massive inexpensive NAS (with raid), as I have run out of space, and refuse to lose data when I lose a drive. The Buffalo product is probably as cheap as building your own linux box, setting up RAID and sharing out the filesystem, unless you have some spare parts lying around. In fact, the Buffalo is based on linux. I think this will be a big industry, very soon, as these devices become more affordable and people learn their value. My prediction is that the HDD vendors will start coming out with home NAS products this year. I mean, who isn’t burning their entire CD collection to disk right now to stream directly to the squeezebox? Plus with the advent of the digital photograpy revolution, who can afford to lose all their data? Not me. But even with home raid, there is still the chance of fire, flood, or theft, which makes raid pointless. Yep, you need long term off-site backups. There are a few internet solutions now, but nothing that looks too tempting, although 10gb for free is pretty neat considering the average hard drive in a computer wasn’t much bigger than that 5 or so years ago. In the future, I bet we’ll all have this sort of thing.
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