Blink was touted as one of those "must read" business books. It is written by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, which was brilliant and I recommend highly. Blink however was not so impressive. It is one of many books that is essentially a compilation of stories which, presumably, support the author's thesis.
Gladwell relied heavily on the anecdotes – so much so that they frequently had little to do with the author's point. so what was the point? People make split decisions. This can be good or bad. There is a lot of information available to a person on which to base his decision in an instant however she may choose the wrong data in the heat of the moment.
Well who can argue with that? You can do something It can be good or bad. You may be right or wrong.
The problem with basing your arguments on anecdotes is that anecdotes may be manipulated and are certainly not objective. Frank Serpico (the Frank Serpico) wrote a letter to Gladwell which underlines this point. One of the examples used of "bad decisions made in the heat of the moment" (cop thought there was a gun and shot) could in fact be a calculated decision later retold in favourable light for the perpetrators (cop was shaking down an innocent black man).
The closing story on Abbie Conant is also manipulated somewhat: the author implies that the sexism on the part of the Munich Philharmonic was not overt – they genuinely believe women are physically incapable of playing the trombone well. Abbie tells her own story here and it is clear that the discrimination she faced went beyond a misunderstanding of the abilities of women. The orchestra hired her on the basis of a screened audition before they realised she was female. When they discovered their "error" they were openly hostile, verbally abusive and refused to pay her in line with other musicians. This has nothing to do with subconcious attitudes that affect decision making: it was a case of blatant, well practiced discrimination (a practice carried on by the Vienna Philharmonic).
Blink is an interesting collection of stories but ultimately has little substance.
Tags: blink, books, review
Labels: books
I have a peeve about SETI. SETI searches the airwaves for a call from ET. Although most scientists agree that odds are in favour of intelligent life out there, as yet we haven't found evidence of it.
As it happens, we humans don't bother sending a signal out ourselves. This is because of (1) the energy and thus cost involved and (2) the payback would take several thousand years so why bother.
Well if you believe they're out there, then why be a freeloader? If ET has the same attitude, we'll never get a call through! I suggest making a bit of effort on this front and perhaps it will result in a bit of good karma on the SETI front. Let's make the first call. At the very least, it may mean the universe will echo with our voices after we're all long gone.
I suspect the SETI folks might feel the same way but they probably have barely enough money to do anything but listen. So what do you say Bill? Care to shout at the universe? Think of all the markets without Internet Explorer...
Technorati Tags: setiLabels: rants
This week on Hardtalk Extra, Gavin Esler interviewed
Michio Kaku, a string theorist who discussed the theory of the
Multiverse and how our present universe is expanding too rapidly and will one day freeze over. No worries, there is a chance that we could make our escape through a wormhole into a baby universe if we could just figure how to get through a black hole without being reduced to a singularity.
As it turns out, there are likely universes which share our time and space but which occupy other facets of the 11 dimensions (of which I'm only aware of 4) and this could explain the origin of the
dark matter which accounts for about 90% of the gravitation in the universe.
In an effort to explain how the human race needs to pull up its sock to achieve this feet, Kaku described 3 categories of advanced intelligence
- those with planetary control - ie control over their own planet's power system: waves, wind, geothermal, etc.
- those with stellar mastery ie can somehow capture or manipulate the power of stars
- those with galactic mastery... well you can see were we're going with this. Picture something from The Spacing Guild, Dune.
The human race doesn't even rate and is presently category zero. Now clearly if we're going to make our escape from this universe a few billion years down the road when it starts getting frosty, we're going to have to make some advancements.
It was at this point I figured ol' Michio was smoking something pretty good. Humans survive a billion years?! Are you kidding?
But he did go on to point out that it's possible the reason that SETI has not heard from ET, even though we're pretty sure there must be SOME intelligence out there, is perhaps because so many end up blowing themselves up or destroying their environment... as this may a likely risk of the genetics that comes with surviving the harsh complexities of evolution.
Kaku acknowledged that getting through the next billion years will be pretty difficult if we don't get through the next 100 years... a period he believes is critical because at present there are (I paraphrase) "Strong forces trying to take us into the future opposed by others that would have us regress by a thousand years." I read this as a criticism of religious extremists everywhere (including certain Muslim fanatics and President Bush) but then I would. It could have equally meant that we might still blow ourselves back into the dark ages.
Kaku touched on the religious implications of the universe coming to an end and the existence of the multiverse. Apparently some people think life might not be worth living if we're all going to die in a billion years... that it somehow disproves the existence of God. Huh? News flash: we all ARE going to die. Why should the end of the species have more religious significance than a single life? Anyway what about the revelations?
As for the multiverse, apparently some people want to know whether that implies there's more than one Jesus Christ. [ expletives have been deleted here ] The lack of imagination about our "anthropomorphic god" is mind boggling. Anyone who is worried that the multiverse might somehow affect the Pope's dominion over lost souls (or is that Satin's job?) is NOT invited when we make the jump to the next dimension! You can stay and watch hell freeze over.
Technorati Tags: rant, multiverse, Michio Kaku, survivalLabels: science
If you'd told us the truth, we would've told you to shove that red pill right up your ass.
Cypher, The Matrix
What if I told you that you had the choice between (Red Pill) learning that the matrix, which underlies our modern way of life, is an illusion or (Blue Pill) carrying on enjoying the illusion? Well this is about the Red Pill. You can choose to take it or not. But the fact is that the Red Pill lies around every corner and as time passes, more and more Morpheuses will appear in different guises. Some will whisper, some will make offhanded comments and some will shout so loud you will confidently discard their rantings as insanity.
But their voices will slowly grow... over months, maybe years - I cannot say. But here is one account of the Red Pill.
I should start by saying I'm not too thrilled I took the Red Pill. Nobody else offered the Red Pill with a warning. Nobody said "this will unsettle you and change your world view - and not really for the better." However I am different. I am considerate. Here I am giving you the opportunity now to turn around.
No? OK but don't say I didn't warn you.
Please note that I'm generally an optimist. I love science fiction films which depict our high tech future. From Star Trek to The Fifth Element, this view of our civilisation's outlook has become part of the collective imagination and fuels the inspirations of yours truly. I want it to become real... and I believe one day it may yet be. But not yet - and may not for another 100, 300, or even 500 years. Nonsense! you say. With the present growth of technology it is but a few years off. But that is simply not the case for the immediate future holds a new dark age. It is the age when 6 billion people try to survive as their main source of energy runs out: Oil.
Of course we all know that oil is a finite resource. But most people are under the assumption that we won't run out for hundreds of years by which time we will be driving around in flying saucers powered by Mr. Fusion. Unfortunately it's not 200 years off. It's not even 50 years off. But whether it's 2 years off or 10 years off, we are already starting to run out.
Yeah yeah no big deal, you say. Technology will save us: we'll just drive different types of cars. We'll build nuclear power stations. We'll have solar panels and windmills. We'll even have more oil: as the price of oil goes up, it will become economical to suck more of the dregs from existing wells. We'll adapt.
Yes we will adapt for sure: I'm not suggesting that Skynet is going to become self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern Standard Time on August 29 and start a nuclear war. Change will be gradual. But the fact is that you cannot fly a jumbo jet on solar power and hydrogen cells in cars don't create energy: they simply store it. You still have to get the energy from somewhere. It will take a very long time to build enough nuclear stations to power the needs of the planet. Oh and then we'll have another major problem but that's another story. In the meantime, things could get ugly.
Few people consider how dependant we are on oil: yes it runs our cars. But it also runs almost every vehicle that transports our food and goods. Look around you. Everything you're looking at got there with the help of oil. It even grows our food: it powers the machines that carry out planting, irrigation, feeding and harvesting. Oils and gas are even used as raw materials in the production of fertilizers and pesticides. Know what plastic is made out of? Oil.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
The Long Emergency
The population of the earth has increased by over 1 billion since I was born. By the time I die, at least another billion will be added. Presently, most of those people live in poverty - thank God. If they were all as wealthy as Americans, if they all used fridges, TVs and drove SUVs, we could be pretty confident that not only would oil supplies be depleted promptly, but that even the most fervent naysayers would have to concede that global warming was on its way to fry us. Energy consumption is tied to wealth and oil depletion is tied to energy consumption. Let them eat cake but please keep them from modern appliances.
Of course we don't want people to be poor - just poor enough to make us nice things cheap and leave us the remaining oil reserves. Unfortunately, places like India and China seem unwilling to cooperate. They each have roughly a billion people and are growing both in terms of numbers and prosperity. China has huge energy needs and no Kyoto protocol is going to stop them from claiming the wealth that we have been flaunting for generations. Who will stop them? They have a taste for it and will grow as will India and many others. Didn't you hear? The Asian Dragons are back and they are breathing fire. Several billion people want more.
So consumption is not only growing, it's skyrocketing. And supply? Well it's not skyrocketing. It's flattening out and is preparing for a sharp decline. When? Well those inclined to call it generally say 2007 is the peak. Some say as far out as 2015. Either way it's now - it's this generation. It's not just something you can leave your grandkids to worry about.
Easter Island
Lets say I put you on Easter Island and there are two tribes: yours with your friends and family and the other tribe at the opposite end of the island. The others aren't exactly your enemy but they're rather strange and can sometimes be aggressive. They are certainly unpredictable. OK so everthing is going along swimmingly: there's lots of fish and lots of fruit and both villages have lots of babies. Unfortunately, one day it becomes clear to you that the resources of the island won't support everybody. You've reached the tipping point. Your choice is to carry on with the status quo and eventually watch your children become malnourished and die or you can go over and slaughter the other tribe and thereby live comfortably on the island's bounty. Bear in mind that they also understand that resources are running out and may choose to kill you too. So what do you do?
Personally I think if you had the ability to kill the others with some manufactured disease then that would be best: it would just look like they died of natural causes and nobody would get upset at the slaughter. But a more humane solution might simply be to take over their territory, take their resources and subject them to living off scant supplies under your military rule. Some sneaky in-between measure might be to simply instigate them to fight with each other and cause their infrastructure to break down so they are unable to harvest and distribute their resources. Or you could take the direct approach. There are probably lots of ways you could legitimize moving into their village and killing them off. Whatever works.
Sounds horrible? Well ask around and find out how many people are really willing to give up the cheap electricity to power 24/7 broadband and cheap oil to power their SUVs. Are people going to be happy about not running their heating in winter nor aircon in summer? Please! Anyway the average person is not going to have to make that call. For the most part the masses have already proven they're too stupid to be decisive. The choices will be made for them.
As oil supplies run out, we're going to need to find more. We're going to have to rip up some nice places and of course move in to take over others. It's unpleasant but when people start to see their lives changing, they will be willing to pay the price to protect it.
Oil will disappear from some places sooner than others. Those who can't pay - notably the third world net importers - will suffer first. and yes they will suffer. People will die, but some people will survive and learn to live a different way. But it won't be the glorious future they dreamed of for their children - nor will ours.
The decline won't be rapid. There will be signs that first appear to be just noise: a bit of volatility in the market. But slowly these temporary turns for the worse become permanent changes: Oil at $58/barrel? It should come back down... maybe. OK so what if it doesn't? Demand is rather price insensitive at these levels so we adapt. The price of everything dependant on oil goes up... and well that's basically everything. So I pay more for gas and buy less video games... OK so then there's an economic downturn. It will turn up again. And so it does, but the turn is dampened by the ever rising price of energy... And so it goes. It's a descending spiral. International trade slows, there is growing unemployment, rising crime. Slowly, more and more parts of the US look like Flint Michigan.
When the day comes that it is too expensive to run the garbage trucks that take the waste of millions out of the city every day, you'll know you had better head for the hills. In fact, you might consider planning ahead on that one.
So where's that great future I believe in? It's out there, I'm just not going to get to see it. I thought I'd get a glimpse of it but now I think all I will glimpse is the coming of the new dark age.
This is, of course, a bit of a bummer. I can't enjoy stuff quite the way I used to. Like when National Geographic shows some fantastic documentary about how NASA plans to one day colonize the moon and even Mars, all I can think of is: You guys are in for a BIG surprise! You better think of another way of getting there besides blowing up thousands of pounds of fossil fuels because, lemme tell you baby, that stuff ain't gonna come cheap and by they time you have figured out how to get your ass to Mars, there may be none left.
I really hope that the future of interstellar relations, flying cars and 3D video phone is somewhere out there. There are many ways this planet can be destroyed and many more ways the human species can just make it uninhabitable for themselves but leave a lot of other creatures in peace. But I still have this belief that, while we're in for a rough ride, whether it's 100 years or 1000 years of darkness, we will emerge on the other side and realize the collective imagination of a lost civilization. A civilisation who's matrix gave way because too many opted for the Blue Pill.
Technorati Tags: rant, peak oil, futureLabels: rants
In a lot of countries, you can drive out of the city, and soon you are in farm country and can see gangs of cows loitering in the fields. Kids in Singapore haven't been able to experience this... until now. Comfort is doing a promo campaign which involves planting these colorful cows everywhere.
It seems in fact that the cows are multiplying as there are more each day... Perhaps this can explain it:
There must be a few bulls in the crowd because otherwise Singapore wouldn't allow it...
Labels: travel
Sunny my reflexologist was here this afternoon. This involves a lot of massage oil, some aromatherapy and me moaning occasionally and saying "tong, tong!" which is Chinese for
pain. Sunny doesn't speak much English and that's usually the extent of our conversation. But seems he knows enough to be able to communicate that
Lan Shui's wife had his first baby (and just remember: you heard it here first).
Sunny left around 6 after which I prepared dinner for two friends who'd come over. The centrepiece of the meal would consist of salmon cooked on a plank of cedar over the BBQ. This is a big thing in Canada now and I'd transported a piece of wood three thousand miles for the occasion. Admittedly I felt vaguely guilty for my complicity in the death of a tree just to add some flavour to my dinner. But what the hell, Salmon on Cedar sounds kinda cool.
According to instructions, you have to soak the wood for an hour and then, after placing the salmon on top of the wood, you have to "put the wood directly on the coals." Coals, schmoals. I soaked the wood and followed the instructions. Except I wasn't using coals: I was using a gas fired BBQ with an open flame.
I left the salmon for 10 minutes while I went to prepare the salad. When I returned, the wood had caught fire and the entire balcony was flooding with smoke. In about one minute, I went from smelling like a Javanese spa to a Canadian forest.
The fire was put out with a cup of water. The salmon was saved. In fact is was cooked perfectly though it seems a bit much to risk burning down the entire building to reach culinary excellence. In my defence, it should be noted that I had to cope with two earthquakes during food preparation - one while surfing the net for instructions on how to use the wood, the other while trying to put out the fire before succumbing to smoke inhalation.
So I had two earthquakes, a fire and still pulled off the perfect dinner.
Tags: salmon, cooking, bbq, lan shui
Labels: personal
It's about 6:33pm and a tremor just hit Singapore. I'm writing this as the lights are still swinging around. We don't get much in the way of tremors unless soemthing sizeable hits Indonesia like last week. Watch this space...
Update (1 hour later):
Well we got another shake at about 7:15pm - just a bit weaker. The original quake has now been registered at USGS at a magnitude of 6.8. The second one was 6.3. Seems there was another smaller one (of 5.8) in between the two that we couldn't feel here.
Technorati Tags: earthquake, indonesia
Labels: world
Health Warning: I'm about to ramble...For all of you who have been reading this blog (and I mean all three of you) you will note that my blog has had a facelift.
And as we're talking, I apologize to everyone who wrote me at my gmail account. I don't know what possessed me to use that as the contact address for this blog other than perhaps, at the time, I was chuffed that I got an account. But actually I only use it when I'm expecting a big-ass mail which is rare. Then I go in and find someone wrote something nice like a month before and now it's too damn embarrassing to reply, even if I really want to say, "Yes I know Glenda is even skinnier in person." But that's sorted now and I swear the addy given works.
And as I'm being gushing, let me just do a mental purge. If it's not apparent from some of my other posts, the peak-oil alarmists have gotten to me and I'm now convinced that we're on the verge of a major oil crisis that within 40 years won't even leave us with enough petrochemicals to make plastic for gameboys. What kind of world is that?
There's absolutely nothing that can be done as we run headlong into disaster (trust me, the world is full of too many powerful greedy people to think we're going to prevent another Easter Island). So the best thing to do is to figure out which stocks to go long and otherwise distract yourself. To this end, I've found listening to Adam Curry and Dan Klass can go a long way.
I also caught the SSO tonight - their first concert back since "the tour" which I'm told was very well received save for the performance at West Point. Well who booked that gig? It's a military academy. They don't get excited for anything but news of the revival of Bob Hope.
Oddly, the concert prompted one of those hotdog moments (you know - "make me one with everything"). I was sitting there thinking how cool it was to be enjoying this unique moment on the planet (while others were having their own unique moments watching Dog the Bounty Hunter or something). Then I realised that besides those enjoying their "Dog" in Singapore, or a sunrise somewhere in California or a football game in Italy, there are probably some aliens, lightyears away, taking in their own cultural moment and that we're all just points of consciousness in the universal continuum. I mean whoa - all this from listening to Mozart. Mahler you could understand - you could easily evoke leagues of Klingons listening to Mahler. But Mozart? This was a just chamber piece - a little violin concert (K219 - "Turkish"). It shouldn't have your mind wandering further than Vienna.
The conclusion is that I need to get out more and talk to real people instead of spending all day messing around with cascading style sheets (a unique form of torture that web geeks flagellate themselves with).
Labels: personal
The markets have been messy lately. First there was the outlook revision of General Motors. On 16 March S&P changed GM's rating from BBB- stable to negative flagging a potential move to non-investment grade; Moody's followed with a downgrade to one notch above junk. The credit warning resulted in spreads widening on GM and in turn funds everwhere began selling their Emerging Market positions. Whether this was because they had margin calls to meet or because suddenly GM paying 10% looked better than getting 5% on some scary Indonesian asset doesn't really matter. The correlation of the markets was evidenced. It's a house of cards.
Next came the prediction of Goldman Sach's analyst Arjun Murti who said oil would go to $105. Is Murti being an alarmist? Actually it strikes me he may be somewhat conservative in his views. He thinks oil will his $105 by 2007 then reduce back to $30 over the following years.
This seems hardly likely if demand is increasing and production is unable to keep up. Perhaps it's actually going to $150. But why stop there? If anything, the price of oil looks set to rise until the well is dry.
On the bright side, perhaps the sun setting on the fossil fuel industry means we will not succeed in transforming the Earth's climate into one that resembles Venus.
So is it possible to hedge your oil exposure (being both a direct and indirect consumer of oil and its derivatives) by going long oil stocks? Perhaps, but it will be a rough ride. That means exposing yourself to the house of cards. You may lose out twice.
Tags: oil, markets, emerging markets, volatility
Labels: finance, rants
