A manly image…

/ Politics

Brief random musing: People always seem to see Republicans/Conservatives as macho, gunslinging, no-holds-barred, get-the-job-done-whatever-it-takes and see Democrats/Liberals as lovey-dovey, unwilling-to-hurt-anyone-or-take-a-stand… regardless of whether they’re actually that way or not.

Try this on for size: take Arnold Schwartzneger, George W. Bush and John Kerry. When it comes to having macho cred, what seperates the Democrat from the two Republicans?

Answer: Kerry is the only one to have personally killed a man with his own two hands. That’s an easy image to have of Schwartzneger of course — just rent it from Blockbuster. But picture it in your head for a second: Kerry’s hands soaked in blood, the gunshots still ringing in his ears. To me the image feels oddly out of context given his more professorial style now. But for some reason it’s easy to imagine buzz-boy-Bush with that macho image… even though I can’t quite bring myself to imagine it as it happens. Every time I try the image in my head always jumps to a vision of Bush and I having had too many drinks at the bar and he’s telling the same old story of how he got his scar… the one we never get tired of hearing ’cause it gets better with every telling.

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Paul Saffo on innovation in Silicon Valley

/ Culture

A few days ago I heard a talk by Paul Saffo (Institute for the Future) on the boom/bust cycle of Silicon Valley and how it all relates to innovation. Here’s a quick (and rough) summary, mostly taken from the notes I jotted into my Treo:

“We’ve never understood how The Valley works.” The conventional wisdom is that success comes from good management, right mix of capital and technology, etc. But that’s not it.

Silicon Valley is not built on success, it’s built on failures. Our best innovations come rising out of the ashes of our previous disasters. We need failures and large-scale wipe-outs like a forest needs fires to get rid of the undergrowth. In brief, Silicon Valley’s success is built on bad management.

Example: Why did the Web take off here, and not in Switzerland where it was invented? Because we’d just had a wipe-out in interactive TV. We had just trained an entire generation of C++ programmers in the subtleties of interactive graphics, and then laid them off so they had nothing to do.

“Our core competence in Silicon Valley is managerial incompetence.” &mdash bad management is the key to our vital boom-bust cycle. Furthermore, the whole point of good management is to kill stuff that isn’t relevant, and that kills innovation. “Well-run companies kill ideas. Poor management allows weeds to grow. Around here, weeds grow to become very valuable.”

So how do we survive in spite of our generally bad management? “we substitute velocity for management… that is a very rational act” given the uncertainty in the new technology sectors. Microsoft is the exception that proves the rule: “they aren’t a technology company at all, they are a company that happens to sell technology… they’ve never had an original idea in their life.” Microsoft would never have survived in the Valley, because the culture wouldn’t have allowed it. In their first down-cycle, all their engineers would have left for a different company. Up in Seattle the culture is different — there’s a lot more company loyalty. Silicon Valley is a place that eats its old. We’ve no respect for our elders… that’s how we work.

In all this is the question of innovation. Innovation isn’t rational — most companies and most ideas fail. “Innovation is extra-logical… economists can’t put their finger on it.” The culture can’t let failure be lethal (as it is in France) or no one will dare attempt anything. But it also can’t have no consequence, as is the case with what’s called “interpraneurism” within large companies. Innovation is very hard in large companies — it can be done, but it takes large amounts of stress to make it happen. Successful entrepreneurs have a balance between an altruistic “change the world for the better” angel on one shoulder and a “get rich” devil on the other. The culture in Silicon Valley lucked into having the right mix.

So why do we still innovate out here and not just rest on our laurels? Why do millionaires out here keep feeding their gains back into the system? For some reason, we seem to be a strange attractor for would-be world-changers. Saffo’s fear: will we start to fear change now? Will we finally decide we like what we have and refuse to tear down the old empires, like the Venetians did after their peak in the 1500s?

Final advice: disrespect your elders, remember that innovations extra-logical, and be willing to tear down the old empires.

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BUSH DEFEATS KERRY

/ Politics

DocBug Exclusive — with just a day before polls open, Fox News has declared George W. Bush the winner of what has proven to be the most contentious presidential election since four years ago. CNN, CBS and NBC took only minutes to jump on the breaking story with their own announcements of the Bush victory, but it was over an hour after the victory that ABC‘s Peter Jennings finally called the election for Bush. “We hadn’t finished designing our title-bar logos,” explained Jennings. Among broadcasters, NPR remains the sole hold-out to insist on waiting till the polls at least open before declaring a winner. Most major newspapers have also reported the Bush victory, except for the Chicago Daily Tribune, which has declared a victory for Thomas E. Dewey.

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Connecting a few dots…

/ Politics

Just in case you were tempted to believe the spin that the HMX, RDX and PETN explosives at Al-Qaqaa had already disappeared when our troops arrived:

Dick Cheney:

It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad.

Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel:

The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making John Kerry’s latest ripped-from-the-headlines attack baseless and false.

Tom Brokaw:

Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives. We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them.

For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived. That is possible, but that is not what we reported.

Associated Press, 5 April 2003 (emphasis mine):

Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq’s largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.

UN weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex, most recently on March 8. But they found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 40 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant’s stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (emphasis mine):

RDX stands for Royal Demolition eXplosive. It is also known as cyclonite or hexogen. The chemical name for RDX is 1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine. It is a white powder and is very explosive.

(Props to Media Matters, and to comments from Omri for prompting me to look for it.)

Connecting a few dots… Read More »

Terrorists endorse Bush?

/ Politics

I’m not sure what to make of this. It’s apparently old-news, though new to me, but after the Madrid attack the terrorists who claimed credit for the Madrid bombing actually endorsed Bush:

A week after the Madrid attack, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claims to act on behalf of al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the bombing and declared a truce in Spain to see if the new government would withdraw its troops from Iraq, but warned that it was gearing up for new attacks.

This part of the declaration was widely reported. However, very few mentioned the more ominous part of that declaration, short of excerpts which were reported by the BBC and Reuters.

The declaration turned its attention to President Bush, saying:

“A word for the foolish Bush. We are very keen that you do not lose in the forthcoming elections as we know very well that any big attack can bring down your government and this is what we do not want.

“We cannot get anyone who is more foolish than you, who deals with matters with force instead of wisdom and diplomacy.

“Your stupidity and religious extremism is what we want as our people will not awaken from their deep sleep except when there is an enemy.

“Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation.

“Because of this we desire you [Bush] to be elected.”

The logic makes sense to me, though I’m skeptical about their assessment of Democrat cunning. Bush supporters will no doubt claim it’s a double-bluff, and that “The Terrorists” really fear Bush. I think the scarier question is whether “The Terrorists” realize that a terrorist attack would mean a landslide for Bush? Could that be why there’s no evidence of an attack being planned before Nov. 2nd? [edit: what I mean is, if they do want Bush, will they lie low thinking an attack will have a Madrid-style effect, or try something thinking that will shore up Bush’s support? Ditto for if they’d like Bush out. This is why I was never good at poker…]

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IAEA: Tons of Iraq explosives missing

/ Politics

IAEA: Tons of Iraq explosives missing:

The explosives — considered powerful enough to demolish buildings or detonate nuclear warheads — were under IAEA control until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. IAEA workers left the country before the fighting began.

So we went in ostensibly looking for weapons of mass distruction, then didn’t even secure the sites we knew about? Why do people feel safe under this administration? For all the bickering about what mistakes they’ve made so far, what scares me is what mistake they’ll make next…

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Touchscreen interface problems

/ Media Technology

There’s been a lot of talk about how touchscreen voting is a better interface than paper ballots, but that we should not (and should not have to) sacrifice the security, understandability and reliability of having a paper audit trail as well. Now it seems we’re seeing interface problems with touchscreen voting.

I expect the voting officials are right that this is a case of “user error” — that’s what we call it in our industry when the interface designer didn’t do enough of a good job and now wants to blame someone else. Having watched technologically-minded researchers get confused when they accidentally trigger our giant presentation touchscreen at work, it doesn’t surprise me much either. Unfortunately, with all the cases of actual voter-registration fraud, invalid and highly-suspicious selctive purging of voters from the rolls, back doors secretly coded into official vote-counting software, and laughable “security” protocols in voting machines these voters (Democrat and Republican) are right to be skeptical. We need to do better.

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