i’ve had the stages of grieving on my mind lately, and so when i discovered that i couldn’t login to gmail this afternoon, i noticed some striking similarities:

1. denial: hmm, that’s odd– a server error. i’ll just login again, gmail will fix everything.
2. anger: gmail is down! can’t those twits do anything right? have they hired too many ex-microsofties or something?
3. bargaining: ok god, if you let gmail be up when i try to login this time, i promise to talk the next person i meet out of going to law school.
4. depression: gmail is down, and it’s never coming back. nothing will ever have its simple ajaxian elegance again. i’m not even sure i want to bother speaking or writing anything ever, since i know that i’ll never see those words wrapped inside of gmail’s pleasing frame. (that’s the stage i’m in right now)
5. acceptance: okay, which of my other 12 email accounts should i use instead?

in the end, it’s all about putting one foot in front of the other.

Labels: uncategorizable

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some of my favorite “like * but for * instead of *” from around the web:

• like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs
• like the State Fair but for sewers instead of livestock
• like Pandora, but for beers instead of music (this one might have some promise)
• like thermostats, but for partying instead of temperature
• like pinnochio, but for joy instead of falsehoods
• like the microwave but for data instead of food (techcrunch: like a gold mine, but for lame analogies instead of gold)
• like a swear jar, but for torontocentrism instead of profanity
• like metafilter, but for itself instead of the web (whoa…)
• like beer goggles but for trees instead of ugly people
• like SETI@home, but for terrorists, instead of aliens
• like Ninjas, but for music instead of assassinations
• like Borges, but for designers instead of writers

update: tony’s list is excellent.

Labels: uncategorizable

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sean kicked off a thread on awful VC elevator pitches of the form “it’s like ___ but for ___ instead of ___” the other day, after we read this piece on techcrunch about scribd, which fits the template as “it’s like youtube but for documents instead of videos.”

so you can imagine the horror i felt when i woke up this morning to read that scribd might actually be succeeding. even though the source is techcrunch, the initial pageview numbers and what not look pretty healthy. i’ve even seen some stuff that was posted on scribd make it to digg’s front page.

where i’m thrown in all of this is that we already had a ‘youtube for documents’ before scribd came along. it was called ‘the world wide web’, and it’s been working pretty well for a few years now.  i’ve been trying to figure out what additional utility scribd provides beyond what the web + browser already did, but nothing comes to mind off hand– even the moderately-useful feature of converting a document into an mp3 is provided by a third-party service.  to be fair, they bring some useful (albeit pre-existing) utilities together into a single place, but at the cost of the author handing over quite a few rights to scribd to do whatever they want with your document (see section 7.2 of their terms).  it’s the intellectual property equivalent of selling your soul for a bag of cheetos.

i have a different complaint about the “youtube but for data” companies, like swivel or ibm’s many eyes.  first, they’re not like youtube in the most important way: super-frickin’ easy uploads.  swivel only accepts csv files or google spreadsheets, many eyes has a full page explaining the proper way to upload data into their system.  but this sort of constraint makes no sense when 99% of people do their data analysis in excel.  make it super-easy to upload and download the data in the eleventy zillion different excel file formats.  first and foremost, if you want to be the youtube of ___, you have to get that one right.  if nothing else, scribd has showed that people are too lazy to use the ’save as html’ option in word, so there’s no reason to expect people to use the ’save as csv’  option in excel.

second, i can’t create the kind of experience i want to give users with the tools swivel and many eyes provide.  for video, there are certain narrative structures and patterns that people are aware of and can create using simple video editing tools, but the final product is always the same- a linear sequence of images and sound, just like a movie or a TV show.  data visualization can (and i believe should) have an dynamic and interactive quality to it– like a video game, where the user is exploring a small universe in a nonlinear fashion.  the challenge– and the opportunity– for these sites is to develop the tools that allow users to create these experiences by building out and tying together basic data visualization metaphors.  the trendalyzer toolkit google acquired is a step in the right direction– the gapminder visualization is stunning and loads of fun to play with.

Labels: web2.0

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i spent the summer after my sophomore year in college working on a research project at carnegie mellon in pittsburgh. it was a powerful experience for me– both in terms of my evolution from a mathematician into an engineer (thank you matlab, for being such a beautiful language) and in terms of my emotional devolution from human being to multicellular automaton.

i was coming to pittsburgh from a pretty bad breakup, and as is usually the case in these situations, i kicked off a personal renaissance– devoting alot of time to good books and good music (this is about the time i really ‘heard’ radiohead for the first time, thanks to david and matt). one great source of (free) reading material i discovered was bibliomania, where i read of human bondage by w. somerset maugham.

(aside on language: i feel like you can tell good writing because it ’sounds right’ in your head. i’m sure everyone has a different preference for what sort of writing sounds best to them, but for me, the only person who has ever sounded better than w. somerset maugham is virginia woolf. even his name rolls off your tongue like buttercream.)

the book follows the life of a guy in britain who is born with a club foot as he grows up and makes his way in the world. much of the story focuses on his relationship with mildred, this generally horrible waitress who he is hopelessly in love with and how she almost destroys his life. well, i guess not ‘almost’– she does destroy his life, he just happens to recover.

the timeframe of the story is 1800s britain, and the ideas of the enlightenment and modernity have a strong influence on the main character– as a young adult, he commits himself to living his life by reason and rationality.  he fails miserably at this, as his passion for mildred generally overrides his better judgement.  he only really gets his life together when he recognizes that all of his decisions are driven by emotion and he stops denying their primacy.

i wrote most of this post before reading that piece on spinoza i linked to below.  i had originally planned to write a paragraph here on how attempting to live your life by reason and rationality is itself an emotionally-driven decision– it’s a decision that you make when you’re terrified of your emotions.  i referred to myself above as a multicellular automaton, implying that i somehow killed off my internal emotional life over the past couple of years in order to avoid pain.  but now i’m wondering if i didn’t just prefer the emotional experience derived from abstract thought to the emotional experience of human interaction.  this makes me feel better– the idea that i might not just have been running away in a blind panic, that there was a natural place for me to go and feel at home, even if i wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

Labels: literature, philosophy

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i once took an iq test that told me i thought like spinoza, but i never really followed up by reading anything about him– until just now. this conversation on spinoza is fascinating.

update: this line from the piece is just too good not to include here, so that i might remember it for all time–

You want to cure yourself of being human, buddy? You must be one hell of a freaking mess inside to think you’ve got to go to that kind of length just so that you don’t have to take a good hard look at yourself.

But then, Spinoza would respond (not even deigning to address the slight to his innards): What’s the alternative, my friend? A world constantly shattered by jihads of one form or another?

Labels: philosophy

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i went to the heather gold show last night with sean and sean’s friend gordon from the internet archive. the show last night was on continuous partial attention, which is a term that seems to intuitively makes sense to anyone who has experienced it. heather had a variety of guests on to talk about CPA (although oddly, that abbreviation wasn’t used at any point in the evening), either about how this was a bad thing that should be stopped because it’s destroying our brains, or how it was an okay-to-good thing that was just part of our natural evolution as human beings. this is somewhat glib, but i’m going to go ahead and lump the invited guests into one group or the other here:

• CPA as bad thing: micki krimmel, doug pray
• CPA as good thing: derek powazek, lane becker
• CPA as other thing: justin hall, liz belile

i put myself in the ‘CPA as good thing’ camp, and I had the opportunity to go up on stage and sit with everyone and discuss my own experience with CPA for a few minutes. alot of the conversation focused on how our technology and our online lives takes time away from opportunities for self-reflection or just being with yourself. personally, i do most of my reflection in the shower, since the threat of electrocution generally provides me with a great opportunity to put down the laptop and just spend a few minutes with myself. the shower is where i think over whatever great puzzle is challenging me at the time, be it at school or work or in my personal life, and try to integrate the puzzle into the background of my daily thought pattern. and then, for the rest of the day, i subject myself to the noise of existence– random conversations, blog posts, chats, whatever, in a fierce attempt to find whatever idea or image changes my perspective from the problem into a solution. sometimes problems spend a few hours in the background, sometimes they become these persistent themes that last for weeks and weeks and get woven in with other problems.

my point in all of this is that doing CPA is a great thing for me– it’s not just that i have this need to constantly be aware of what is going on in the world (although i do), it’s that being exposed to all of these different ideas has become critical to my thinking process. it seems like every year my intellectual and professional life becomes more about insight and intuition and less about logical deduction and sequential processing, since so many of those tasks have been outsourced to the computers all around us. it’s like my ability to tie disparate ideas together has become how i differentiate myself from my tools.

(aside: i wrote this post over the course of several IM conversations, two phone calls, a face-to-my-face-looking-at-the-computer conversation, and three panel sessions, including about 75% of bruce sterling’s closing rant, which has been delightfully angry.)

books related to this post: of human bondage, the rise of the creative class

Labels: math, sxsw

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i’m hanging out right now in the platinum lounge at sxsw- it’s quiet and a great place to write a couple of things before i head over to wait in line for kathy sierra’s keynote. my first session of the morning was on turning your internal, fun projects into revenue generating businesses. this is my first sxsw, and i’ve been struck by two things so far– the oddly comforting feeling of being in a room full of people who are just like you, and the extent to which business and play mixes here. one of the guys asking questions during the session was from ebay, and he was responding to a comment by ted rheingold of dogster (which I really have to think about signing indy up for) about how affiliate marketing was not, in general, a good way to earn revenue for a site. the ebay guy was talking about how much success that the ebay affiliates had had with various kinds of auction programs and what not, and it was an interesting perspective– he didn’t come off like a shill for ebay, which he of course is, so maybe that’s a complement to how exceptionally good his shilling technique was.

the conversation also focused on selling, marketing, and building out a company, and i thought the most interesting comments were by the panelist who seemed most out of place– gabe rivera of techmeme. the techmeme family of sites is exceptionally cool and addictive, and gabe does it all by himself- all of the tech and all of the ‘business’ oriented stuff. i think that’s a large part of the appeal he has in the tech community- he makes something cool, and he does it in that idealized lone-gunman style that so many of us wish we could emulate– he serves as the counterexample to the annoying business folks who say we can’t do it without them– and geeks love counterexamples.

i think the one thing i would have liked to have heard gabe talk about is why he went with sponsorship for techmeme, instead of doing contextual advertising. i can think of my reasons– his site is really as much of a webapp as it is a content site, and since seo is hard for his site, i could see where good contextual advertising would be as well. the predictability of the sponsorship model must also be nice from a stability perspective- especially as he indicated that he went without salary for a year in order to get techmeme going. it might also just be that a sponsorship-oriented advertising model fits better for techmeme- so many geek bloggers have an obsession with getting a post on techmeme’s front page in as large a font as possible (an obsession i share, i’m not afraid to admit), that it’s become an important hub of buzz for all of us, and companies want to grab a piece of that mindshare on a regular basis and are willing to pay for it. the sponsorship seems to fit in best with what techmeme is all bout– and maybe that is really what the point of that talk was all about– doing a business built around something you would do for fun is a great way to figure out what you’re all about, and that’s the core thing we’re all after.

P.S.– I’m finishing this post up after hearing kathy sierra’s talk on usability, which was amazing and I’ll try to say more about later, but the one practical effect it’s had on me right now is i’m very conscientous of using contractions in my writing now, so as to sound as human-like as possible.

Labels: sxsw

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most people don’t like math. it’s just one of those things. it seems like doing math requires a certain isolation that most people find unnatural. it’s not just isolation from other people, it’s isolation from the world of ideas. euclid laid down the five axioms of geometry more than 2000 years ago, and those five axioms have served as the laws of the universe in high school geometry ever since. it all feels very restrictive.

this restriction and isolation extends to how we teach the individual subject areas of math in school- geometry for a year, algebra for a couple of years, maybe some trigonometry and calculus. the different areas build on each other to some extent, but since you’ve generally forgotten most of what you learned the previous year, it’s hard to see the ties that bind the different subjects together. and this is the great tragedy of math education, because there’s a secret behind all of this seemingly different math stuff that most people never find out about: it’s all the same thing. it all ties together.

i’m sure that sounds strange, but it’s true, and it’s true in a way that we don’t really fully understand yet. we still only have these glimpses of the connections between the different areas. let me give you my favorite example of this, using three of the weirdest numbers that most people ever encounter.

first, let’s take pi, that number that is kinda sorta approximately 3.14159… most people come across pi when they are learning how to calculate the circumference or the area of a circle, but pi actually shows up everywhere in mathematics, often in really unexpected places. introducing people to pi as the way we calculate the area of a circle is like introducing someone to the adventures of huckleberry finn by showing them how effectively it can be used as a beverage coaster.

next, let’s take i, which is a number that is defined as the square root of negative one. it always feels to me like i is the red headed stepchild of algebra. i have this image of some mathematician going along a couple of hundred years ago, working out the quadratic equation or whatever, and then he comes across an equation like x^2 + 1 = 0, and has one of those oh shit moments. believe it or not, these moments are somewhat common in math. the greeks had this religious cult called the pythagoreans who actually executed this guy who figured out that the square root of 2 was an irrational number. i have to wonder if there was some other guy around that time who wondered about the square root of negative one, but thought of the poor square root of 2 guy and kept it to himself.

the last number in this triumvirate is e, which most people don’t come across until calculus. it’s a magical number, not unlike pi, that shows up all over the place in math. the various ways it’s defined can be found at mathworld, but the way in which it’s usually used is pretty familiar- we usually come across e as a base for an exponent. In the same way that 2 raised to the fifth power is 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 32, we usually end up raising e to some power in order to do…something. sometimes we do it to get a job at google. sometimes we do it to find something like this:

e raised to the (i*pi) = -1.

it’s perfectly understandable if your reaction is sort of like this, that was my reaction the first time I ever saw it.

three of the weirdest numbers in mathematics, each of which arises from a separate subject area (trigonometry, algebra, calculus) combined together in such a way that you end up with one of the simplest numbers around. it’s extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinary obscure, and that’s a shame. it seems like we teach math in such a way that students much suffer for years of seemingly pointless formula manipulation in order to get just a glimpse of the really good stuff behind it all. and we wonder why we have a hard time getting kids interested in math or finding people who want to teach it.

books related to this post: pi in the sky

Labels: math

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