Playing sandcastles with Drake

Laureate

I sometimes wish those ancient Greeks had trademarked ‘laureate’. Next we will have Marrickville Council Garbo Laureate and the Clovelly Primary Spelling Laureate.

Missiles and bombs

Yesterday my nephews, yet again, displayed tremendous and otherwise hidden concentration skills when plotting how to maximize the altitude of their home grown missiles.

Temporarily discarded was the idea of a airborne launch off a quad-copter drone – that is being trialed tonight in fact.

What was proposed and after much discussion executed was a soda gas bomb. The ingredients were; a soda gas carbon dioxide cylinder about 7 cm long and 2 cm in diameter (the ones used in those handheld old-school soda water bottles), surrounded by the grey stuff scraped off a dozen sparklers, wrapped in aluminium foil and then ignited in a steel bucket using a sparkler for a wick.

The result was an almighty bang and the exploded soda gas cylinder landed onto the roof of the garage.

After much brow furrowing, next up was a variation on the former effort, where the bomb, instead of being placed in a metal bucket was placed into a long metal tube (sounds familiar) – the tube was in fact the handle of a large car jack. Essentially we created a mortar and the results were spectacular. The missile (upgraded in category from a bomb now) was blown up and out of sight, never to be found.

Excited by this early success tonight’s efforts may incorporate the aforementioned drone launch and the use of a much larger Soda Stream bottle (at least 10x the size, probably much bigger). This should have enough explosive force to reach low flying aircraft.

This may be a good moment to excuse myself from further incriminating involvement in the project!

Flinders St Asylum

Found in Flinders St – an immigration museum (sic). The mind boggles.

For a start modern Australia is one great big immigration museum. And secondly, do you reckon there is a special exhibition on asylum seekers in there?

One thing for sure it would make a great backpackers. Extra income for the museum and real live exhibitions for the patrons.

Excepting

When in doubt repeat after me.

Bankism, Conspiracism, Capitalism, Hypnotism & Jism

An old friend posted this on FB:

“some time back i was standing in a line at a bank and i was amused by the glossy propaganda on the wall…it read WE ARE HERE TO TEACH YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT MONEY…..i found it highly amusing cos if they did that then the kids would be after them with pitch forks…corporate propaganda in synergy with STATE sponsored Bankism (yes it is not capitalism) will take us to a place that we dont want to be as a people….let’s hope that the penny will drop for a few more folk in 2015 and that there will be a greater awakening to the extent of mind control playing out in every aspect of our lives.”

I made a great effort to look past the obvious objections to this effort (grammar, logical consistency, caps lock, futility, lack of humor, etc) to see if it made any sense, in any context.

‘Mind Control’ seems to be the ultimate crime and yet, when I think about it, just about all humans in history have been cognitively captive to their local culture; looked at through the right lens, any individual who happens to object to the culture they are in may lean towards conspiracy theories and claims of mind control.

What I am confused by is the proposed solution. It seems to me that an individual who isn’t with the societal program has two choices; to remove him- or herself from the culture, or attempt to change the culture. Generally speaking the latter is a super low odds activity but, unfortunately, a couple of individuals in history have managed to do it so this gives all the crazies hope.

Also it is worth noting that where an individual has managed to change a whole culture that a majority of people were in significant pain. It is moot whether this is the case for our mob today.

The only pain we seem to be in is the stress related to getting even more of our share of the world’s resources before they run out.

Lemmings, yes. But Lemmings in a state of strained psychotic ecstasy. Awakening them will just make them unhappier.

Uncle Nick

Anthony

The Hume

Blokes

New product idea for blokes … in order to ease the three pocket tap.

A key ring and wallet each with a wireless chip, battery and an alarm. The wallet, keyring and smartphone are all connected and if one goes out of range the others alert the owner.

Greta

Mysteriously marked but unmarked grave of Australian masked cliché.

Such is death by media and metal headed thunking of the osteoporosis risk management department.

At least the kids can play Where’s Ned?

Albury

Tap Timer

Another one of these useless fuckers bites  the dust …

One more and I swear I am going to build my own and put them out of business.

Two Movements

Pertaining to the last two posts; below is my first effort from the alpha prototype of the slow selfie movement app and also my first effort a starting a ‘Dickhead Button for FB’ petition.

Dickhead button

Sometimes I wish FB had a ‘dickhead’ button as well as a ‘like’ button. Just so people get both positive and negative feedback, the latter of which is badly missing in our society.

The Slow Selfie movement

It just occurred to me that Frida Kahlo was the inventor of the selfie.

Sure there were self portraits beforehand but it’s just about all she did.

With oil paints and canvas, she did the slow selfie and you have to admit she did a better job than our fast selfies.

A new app opportunity – the slow selfie that takes at least a week to edit to the final result.

Even truer

This is true

Cockroaches

Yet again, yesterday I bought a coffee for the CEO of a startup.

Amongst other stories I heard this sad one for the umpteenth time.

He had pitched his company to xxxx Capital in Sydney.

They had considered the deal, done a bit of due diligence, but eventually decided the deal wasn’t in their ‘sweet spot’.

However they did offer the CEO their ‘other’ service – the one where he pays them to help him raise funds.

I had to tell him that, sadly, there probably was no investment fund and the whole investment charade is standard fare in this fair city of ours.

Wrapping or non-wrapping?

I truly think that Peter’s of Kensington at Christmas time is a little taster/entree for hell.

Imagine spending an eternity in the place? Even if it isn’t hell, I would slit my wrist soon enough and get there anyway.

Cricketball

I watched my first game of T20 cricket last night.

It made me think they didn’t go far enough – I propose a new version.

Here are the rules:

1. Get rid of the stumps so the only way to get out is caught or runout, or no. 6 below.
2. Runouts are then effected by a fielder tagging (with ball in hand) the runner before he/she crosses the crease line
3. Each batting team gets 9 innings
4. Each innings is over when the batting team has lost three wickets
5. If you hit the ball you have to run
6. Missing three good deliveries (non-wides) in a row results in an out.

The rest can stay the same.

And they could call it Cricketball. Or as Trev says, Creaseball.

National Terrorism Public Alert System

[Scene] Sydney Taxi.

The driver has ABC news radio on. Which is a nice change from Alan Jones and his like.

I hear that there is some animated debate about our current state of terrorist alert.

A quick web search later and I find this:

“National Terrorism Public Alert System

• low—terrorist attack is not expected
• medium—terrorist attack could occur
• high—terrorist attack is likely
• extreme—terrorist attack is imminent or has occurred.”

This reminds me of our sales pipeline excel spreadsheet.

I used to let the sales guys give a % likelihood of converting suspects to prospects and then to customers.

Now if they find a new suspect this automatically gets a 5% probability, so it doesn’t over-weight the sales forecast. If it hasn’t moved up the probability chart within 3 months it is automatically excised.

If we start talking specs and terms with a suspect they move into ‘prospect’ mode and get a 33% probability of conversion.

If we are negotiating contracts they move to 66% probability and pre-customer status.

Once a contract is signed they become a customer at 100%.

After one year, the moving average of the forecast (i.e. the comparison to what we predicted versus what happened) is used to adjust these fixed percentage values for the next year.

The benefit of this scheme is that it can be measured and calibrated and also it can’t be sneakily played with by the salesmen to snow the CEO, or sneakily played with by this CEO to snow his board.

Now back to the terrorist alert system … here’s my criticisms:

1. They need to assign a time period to the alert. Even a bushfire alert is only good for 24 hours.

2. They need to assign a probability to an alert and within a time period

3. This way, for example, if they say there is a 10% chance of an attack in one week, and after ten weeks of this and there being no attacks, then they know they were over-doing it and could drop it to 5%, etc.

4. The issue with the qualitative alerts that they have is that the words mean different things to different people. Especially considering a good whack of Australians have English as a second language.

5. And ‘extreme’ is extremely silly – how can the same level of alert be applied to an attack that might be imminent and to one that has occurred?

Travel later

There are two types of people in this world; those that walk on travelators and those that stand.

Mains Gas

I feel like taking another shot at the Australian technology incubators this morning … but then maybe I need to balance my commentary because someone might actually be listening.

Despite the fact that the incubators are effectively a pilot light in a system where the mains aren’t connected, one can’t fault the passion of the founders of the incubators.

They truly believe they are doing a noble deed.

Indeed the prevailing mood is one of ‘first encounter’. Essentially they are providing opportunities for emerging natives, the start-up founders, to become somewhat civilized in the arts of the start-up world.

And the incubator model is as good as any because the natives seem to love it. What they, the gen-Y start-up founders, don’t seem to be able to do is discern good advice from the other sort, experience from trite, or good intentions from rape. I don’t know why this slice of wisdom skipped a generation. Too many Christmas presents maybe, but it prevails.

So, accepting that just about all of these gen-Y startup founders will fail miserably or worse still, succeed in a miserly fashion, the incubator at least provides them an advisory model that they can buy into because all their kith already have. It’s better than nowt and it keeps that pilot light burning.

Here’s hoping someone turns on the mains some day.

It’s a theory mate

From the Silicon Valley irony-free zone

“The Bright Spot Theory; the basic idea is that when the clouds roll in, you look past the disappointments and identify at least one ray of sunshine, however small it might be. You then double down on that and ignore everything else.”

This, in the flat plains of freeways, urban sprawl, dollars and technology, equates to wisdom.

In English you might say; “Our first idea didn’t work but because we still had some of our investors cash to spend, rather than just quitting we took the bit that showed some promise and put all our efforts into that”.

My hypothesis is that the dudes in the Valley feel somewhat emasculated, them being geeks, nerds and pudding men in chinos, and hence the tendency to co-opt tough talk from the sports world.

And they also like to show their mates that they are smart, so they mix it up with the sort of philosophical insights one might find on the back of your grandmother’s toilet door.

Ten minutes after its cesarean delivery, every VC in the Valley will be rushing to share the new theory in order to impress upon the listener how dialed in they are to the drum beat in the jungle.

Common good trauma

The story that I have been told is that Christianity was the first religion built on the foundation of the greater good, as opposed to selective good and evil

Since then a number of competing religions have claimed the same mantra.

The paradox for the owners of these religions is that they had to make any following of the alternatives a mortal sin, hence denigrating their own mantra of common good.

Indeed, since they didn’t have copyright laws to fall back on they also had to make misuse of their brand a mortal sin.

I suppose it was all for the greater good in the context of personal greed.

The solution is secular common good systems which have built in protection against control by the greedy.

However this transition period where secular and religious common good causes are coexisting looks pretty traumatic. Since the latter are being replaced by the former; it’s no surprise there is a bit of push back.

Mankind’s top ten discoveries and inventions

My quick list.

1. Speech
2. Fire
3. Missionary position
4. Social care religions
5. Maths
6. Birth control
7.  Systematic questioning of orthodoxy ( enlightenment)
8. Electricity
9. Telecommunications inclusive of the net
10. Mechanical transport

Passive aggressive

Back to Australian start up incubators.

If they take liquidated pref shares and veto control rights in return for a few thousand dollars investment, and they don’t bother to take a board seat, then to me this looks like passive-aggressive behavior.

Learnt

‘Learned’ is an adjective that is pronounced as two syllables.

Whereas we here in Australia have learnt to pronounce it in one.

Two wise trees

The third one was out appeasing the Greens.

SMH

Gee I am glad we have the herald here in Sydney. This morning, one section in particular caught my eye.

New product idea; an irony detector for online newspapers which is used to place online articles automatically so as to avoid claims of utter stupidity.

Sweet spot

In the gambling world there is a long odds phenomenon where a emotional bias to betting on long odds reduces the return on investment. See the plot below.

Government intervention into the business environment in a democracy suffers a similar fate. Long odds are guaranteed by a non-financial aversion to risk, driven by the fear of negative publicity, in turn driven by claims of favoritism or negligence.

The result? Government initiatives driven by process and not outcomes.

It’s a chronic problem in the west highlighted by the success of certain government interventions in some countries with less representative electorate systems.

Of course, there is a inflexion point where less public review just results in corruption and rubbish returns for the tax payers.

What I am trying to say is that there is a sort of sweet spot in democratic systems where a certain degree of public feedback is entertained and ensures the best returns on government investment.

We are way past this sweet spot here in Australia, which is ironic given that, almost to a man or woman, we look to government to fix every problem

Senate willing

You know, if I was running for government in opposition, I would preface all my promises to the electorate and the lobby groups with ‘Senate-willing’.

And if the Senate rejected my policies I would drop them until the Senate changed their collective minds. Bugger negotiating with the black-mailing independents or irrationally opposed opposition.

And then I would head off to the pub for the rest of my term in office.

My suspicion is that Australians wouldn’t really mind a government that did bugger all, just for a change. Most wouldn’t even notice.

And if this process was spun out for the whole first term the government would almost assuredly be reelected with Senate control.

It’s called the long game.

I can’t for the life of me understand why the incumbents, having watched the last mob strive to actually do things without control and subsequently fall miserably, attempt to do the same. Just plain silly.

Is this true?

If you want to float a pet hypothesis, just say it mate. Nothing worse than a gutless question for a heading.

PS the answer is ‘I doubt it. The government’s pressure on wages is probably just a second order affect, the primary affect being the softening demand for our exports and under-scale business investment in differentiated growth.’

Fingernail index

Little things…

When I get too busy in life the first victim is my fingernails. They simply don’t get cut. It’s great having such an obvious indicator for stress. Thank god I don’t chew them.

Truth beauty

With respect to emotional matters, a truth is just an opinion that dwells comfortably with kindred opinions. Sometimes even complacently so.

Martin Place

Milk alcohol 0.05

Last night a friend limited her alcohol intake due to concerns about her breast milk; she has two babies.

We concocted a new first world product – a mother’s milk alcohol level analyser.

It probably already exists but we couldn’t be arsed checking.

You Tube is a closed cylinder

My wonderful nephews  unfortunately did not receive much of an education.

This renders then susceptible to influences of any which persuasion.

To wit; right now they are buried in YouTube, convinced that ISIL is out to kill each and every Australian.

The defining data to support this hypothesis is that ‘four of our women’ have gone ‘over there’ to marry terrorists.

You have to admit there’s not much to work on here.

Chocolate Insurance

I just had a quick peruse of the Sydney papers whilst a Microsoft update rendered my laptop functionless.

The respectful moratorium for the victims of the chocolate bomber seems to be over and all sorts of questions are being asked in the media.

The big question that I haven’t seen addressed is whether all those businesses with business continuity insurance have found an exclusion in their contracts for acts of terrorism.

Was this terrorism or a nutter? This will be painful

Patents and your economy

Misinformed commentary persists on the matters of patents….

Patents provide for less risk into investment into new technology.

Stronger patent rights lower the risk of investment in technology, resulting in more investment.

Data point; USA. The strongest patent rights in the world underpinned by jury-led high damages, product injunctions, and contingency lawyers for patent enforcement.

And it’s the most inventive nation in the world with the highest investment in R&D. This is not a coincidence.

House punt

In a pure game of chance, if played long enough, everyone reverts to the mean and gets their money back.

Unless the house takes a cut in which case, over time, everyone loses all their money betted.

The severity of the house cut just determines how long the punters get to play, on average, before they lose their money.

In a game where there is no house cut but there is a little predictability, those that know the correlations act as the house and everyone else gets to lose their money as of they were playing a game of chance.

If there is a house as well then that just compounds the problem for the punters.

And for what it’s worth, over time the longer the odds that these guileless punters play, the less average gambling time they get per dollar.

Dear Breville

I was asked today what improvements I would make to my Breville espresso machine.

Where do I start?

A thermocouple in the steam wand with a gauge on the front panel

A low water warning LED light

A larger range on the grinder  quantity adjuster so my double espresso grind doesn’t always end in spilled grinds

Pertaining to the above a basket with sloped sides to avoid grinds spilling over

Instant cutoff on the steam wand so you don’t risk bubbling your foam when you withdraw the wand

A steam wand that doesn’t scream at you

A coffee counter

A basket which doesn’t hold water after rinsing, causing dribbles all over your kitchen

See, innovation isn’t that hard! All you have to do is use your own product.

Routing madness

I have just set up a new WiFi router.

This one was a tough one because I couldn’t get the setup software out of Chinese.

But it made me think, from a user interface point of view these things haven’t improved in a decade.

You still plug in an Ethernet cable into the router and a PC, and then go to a specific net address in a browser to access the router setup

Why not a phone app accessed via WiFi?

GPS

Taxi apps with maps were created to frustrate people like me.

My current booking had been circling my location for 15 minutes and he has been ‘4 minutes away’ the whole time.

They only reason I haven’t cancelled the booking is that I want to find out why he can’t use a GPS.

Internet terror

Terror sieges probably happen at least once a quarter somewhere on the planet, possibly more frequently.

We seem to care much more about them when they are close to home.

It’s probably the ‘it could have been me factor’.

Given the tweets, emails and blogs that I have been receiving it looks like a pretty step distance correlation function.

Internet marketers take note!

Alien

When I change laptops now it doesn’t take much effort thanks to Google.

Between Chrome and Drive it all just sort of happens. In fact the only reason I store files locally is in case I am ever working offline, which is becoming more and more of a rarity.

So why do we use the Microsoft OS at all?

I think it comes down to the Microsoft Office suite and isn’t it fun watching Google slowly and surely add functionality to their online equivalent?

The other apps on the Microsoft OS aren’t critical for me – sure there are some good ones, but they are succumbing to online services at a rate of knots.

For Microsoft it must feel like having an alien in the belly; slowly growing and with complete surety it will eventually burst out thereby killing its host.

The Pacific Solution

The chocolate terrorist is gone, along with two of his hostages. What a sad and pointless way to die.

I wonder what the reaction will be?

The paper says he was asylum seeker who came to Australia in 1996. They also say he is a lone wolf, possibly an angry man acting by himself.

It’s hard to eavesdrop on a lone wolf; there is little to monitor. If the security forces want to stop this sort of attack then they need to identify and target each and every individual who fits a profile.

And once identified they will have to be monitored for risk factors. I don’t think we can yet arrest people for crimes they might be thinking of committing? Maybe we can.

Of course they could always go the other way and push the suspects at risk into counseling and possibly also give them free holidays in Hawaii every 6 months. We could call this the Pacific (aka peace) solution.

This might work – it would be cheaper than shutting Sydney down every few months.

Tongues

Crowd sourced terrorism

I have been texted by Melbournians to check that I am ‘OK’.

Initially perplexed, I eventually responded ‘all OK, but getting sick of chocolate’.

It just goes to show that you can’t just take what you want and expect no blow back. Especially in a system which encourages technological unemployment and a marketing driven sense of worthlessness.

I expect out governments will embrace the opportunity to show ‘leadership’ and plug the holes with increased security expenditure.

Maybe it’s the right response. Maybe there is no other response that makes sense.

One thing’s for sure, we are who we are and we aren’t who we were.

Dawn Fraser

We thought hard about it and decided to ditch the Xmas shopping for the pool. Easy decision in the end

Kiss the moment

#Dead spam

I just got a spam email addressed from an old friend that has been dead for almost a decade. Despicable.

#screwed

In the last week two pairs of my glasses, reading and sunnies, both lost their screws while I was traveling. Both useless.

It’s the 21st century surely we can do better than screws?

Soluble fiber

Soluble fiber; the term has never made any sense to me.

If a fiber is truly soluble then it would break up into it’s constituent molecules and the fact that it started life as a fiber would mean nowt.

What they actually mean is ‘water dispersible’ fiber. In water such a fiber would be substantially extended and free of entanglement with it’s brethren.

And only a chemist would care about such definitions.

Kickstarter idea; free to a good home

How about hiding a smartphone battery charger in a belt; as in the thing that holds up your pants.

You can get these flexible lithium polymer batteries and there would be no need for the belt to be any thicker than usual.

Silkette

While watching Silk, the legal drama, it has occurred to me that our adversarial court system is odd.

It appears to me that the defendant is always on trial, whereas in fact it should be the evidence of the prosecution that is on trial.

Furthermore, the jury members are forced into making a binary decision on an individual level and then collectively they must argy-bargy until all, or a sufficient weight of them agree on a binary decision.

If the evidence of the prosecution is on trial, then maybe it’s best if the judge and the jury members each give a score from 0-10 on the weight of the evidence. If the average jury member’s score and the judge’s score are both over 50% (or any number between 50% and 100% as chosen) then a guilty charge is upheld, and the severity of the penalty is then impacted by the average of all scores.

Belief

A new report shows that over 80% of American ‘believe’ in climate change.

The only thing that I ‘believe’ in is that other people believe in things.

The problem with belief is that it requires all issues to be reduced to binary choices, and that a mental coin is tossed as to whether one is on that side of an issue, or this.

Why not just assign a probability based on the evidence, do a risk and return analysis and then decide on an action plan, which can be modified as new evidence comes to light?

Of course the answer is twofold:

1. At an individual level this requires a practised and rigourous mind – lazy is easier, and

2. Socially, it is actually easier to count up for the beliefs, the for’s and against’s, than it is to enter into a debate based on probabilities.

Maybe the outcome is the same. Maybe not. But why have we bothered to develop intelligence if we don’t use it?

Automotively patent

A good fraction of the world’s patents are in the automotive industry – one of the most technology advanced and intense product sectors.

Therefore I have always been puzzled by the lack of patent enforcement in this industry, excepting the odd patent troll activity.

I have just had a chat to the senior legal counsel at Hyundai and it turns out that the major players in this industry have a gentleman’s agreement not to enforce their patents against each other.

They don’t cross license either; they just don’t enforce their patents.

So you might wonder why then they have patents at all? Well it’s a gentleman’s agreement so they need to patents just in case someone is silly enough to break it.

This then explains why Tesla can sell cars and infringe thousands of patents without fear. And why Elon Musk can make a bold statements about Tesla not enforcing any of it’s patents – no one would license them anyway. He is giving away nothing.

Calling all starships

Google must have really pissed someone off in China.

Not only have they built latency into Google services here so that they are virtually unusable, there is more.

To get around the embargo I use a VPN. But on any Wi-Fi connection I don’t even get the login page unless I close Chrome, Drive and the VPN software.

And Google isn’t doing themselves any favours elsewhere either.

They have started up the LOT consortium – an attempt to get all companies with phone patents (hardware and software) to sign a non-aggression pact, so that Google doesn’t have to worry about patent rights on it’s loss-leader software and hardware design products. It will just cream the cash off the advertising revenue.

Basically it’s an attempt to keep the rest of the supply-chain barefoot and pregnant.

They are starting to look and feel like Microsoft in the worst days of their monopoly, and in such arrogance do empires falter.

Commuted

Trade BnB

New business idea …

Vacation accommodation website … for tradies. Free accommodation for trade work at the accommodation site.

Temporary playpen

#Religion

When you think about it religion is a form of anxiety. As societies develop advanced social and emotional intelligence this anxiety is addressed at the root cause and the need for religion diminishes.

Ashes to ashes – we don’t need no anxiety control.

########

Hashtags, really?

Why aren’t they all the same colour as the background so we don’t have to look at them?

Nano VC

Have any of you seen a standard Australian incubator termsheet? (for investment into a startup)

Similar to VCs they overpay for control (veto) rights, but on tiny, tiny investment increments.

And they often insist that existing fully paid common stock gets reverse vested – over a period about 5x the time it will take the company to burn through their  investment, leaving the founders a nasty legacy to unwind with later investors.

A truly bizare starting point by which to start a trusting relationship with founders and executive, since they will be relying on this trust to protect their investment later on in rounds that they can’t participate in.

My concern for the startups that sign up for these deals is as always, the problem of ceding control to investors without follow on capital.

They also have a put option were they can get the company to buy back their shares at any time, making the investment a sort of reverse con note, unsecured but with control rights. Weird.

They generally behave to structure deals to protect their investment which results in non standard behaviour, adding massive risks to next round funding.

Unlike the US there isn’t a functioning investment ecosystem in Australia. So the usual relationships between incubators and larger investors, that get sorted in the US, simply don’t exist.

These deals start funky and probably end in tears or a long painful path to SME-dom.

If I was these incubators I would put my money in as a con note and just get over the idea of exercising investor control. They rarely have either the skills or the bandwidth to do so anyway.

Ethically, they are better placed as viewing themselves as vaguely institutional angel mentors and not nano-VCs.

#brain filter

When I have a bad flu or cold the membrane that keeps my subconscious out of my head seems to falter.

On top of a fever I get a  little glimpse of the madness going on under the cover. Thoughts going around and around, clashing on top of each other. I have not a chance to stop it

It gets so bad that sometimes I can’t sleep, which is very unusual for me.

That filter that is there most of the time and just let’s the important stuff through. I love that filter.

Everyone would, but many don’t seem to have it. As a result they suffer anxiety and other conditions. I wonder if anyone has even identified this filter function of the brain?

#twit #curation

What do you reckon is the ratio of tweets written and tweets read?

If it hasn’t already done so I suspect that is going below unity.

That is, a substantial fraction of tweets never get read.

The situation would be even worse for click-throughs from links in tweets.

A lot of noise looking for a purpose.

Curation is needed. And something much better than ‘trending’.

ps Android’s spell checker doesn’t even recognise ‘curation’

#boardingpass

Instead of a bit of cardboard for a boarding pass, how about we get one those buzzers you get at restaurants when they want you to pick up your own food?

It could buzz when you have to board and it could even have a little instructional LCD to tell you where the gate is, serve up the odd ad, etc.

They would be handed out at check in and swapped at the gate for a paper chit with your seat number on it.

Benefits….

1. Passenger management … You could for example buzz people in the order you want them to board.

2. No need for announcements at the airport

3. By incorporating a position sensor you would know where every passenger is in the terminal in case they don’t board.

4. Since airports are just big shopping centers think of the data analytics opportunity!

#Tannoy

Sydney international terminal now has almost continuous audio announcements.

It’s not necessary!!

#campusification

New word for the day.

Campusification.

When a relatively new inner city university campus, such as UTS or RMIT, grows to the extent that eventually they take over all the streets inbetween their buildings and turn them into park-like pedestrian areas.

#words not read

I am fascinated by the changes wrought upon written communications by the Internet.

Once there was a definite structure and a clear and difficult path to being worthy of being published, whereupon an audience was virtually guaranteed.

Nowadays anyone can publish but it’s very difficult to rise above the noise and get read by more than a handful of friends.

It’s also possible that the concentration span of the average reader is suffering a form of Zeno’s paradox, i.e. heading inexorably towards an infinitesimally small tweetish-like length.

I have a number of potentially mutually exclusive hypotheses as to the future of the written word:

1. That the worthy will get read anyway, especially after a short period when all the social media and online publishing technologies settle down, and control by the middlemen emerges again, and

2. The worthy will have to work harder to get read, but will have to suck up less as well. They will be more tired but feel better about themselves, and

3. The length of the intelligent tome will expand or shrink (depends on where you are coming from) to become a super-pamphlet; everything else will be considered as marketing or a boat anchor.

4. A form of never-ending reading will emerge – non-linear stories and information that flow with the reader’s interests. Unconstrained by the paper book format there is no reason why every reader should get the same words. Or why a story should even stop.

5. The never-ending stories might come in increments of 140 characters or 14,000 characters – it depends on what the reader can stomach.

6. Reading will always trump hearing (including videos) – because it is so much quicker. And time is increasingly of the essence.

7. I fear the rise of automated writing. Starting with remixes, this trend will emerge to challenge human writers. It has already started in fact.

8. Every format of the written word will be littered with ads. Off to the side, surveys between chapters, buried in the text, you name it … this is the price we pay for not having any upfront fee.

Hopeful

My latest connection request. Really LinkedIn?

Unsubscribe

This morning I continued my unsubscribe campaign; three weeks in and my inbox(es – thanks Google) are much emptier.

This morning I unsubscribed to the newsletter of a hotel chain that I once used in Spain. They emailed me back confirmation.

Clowns

Social madness

What do we do if we all get caught up in the long tail of social media content and there is no high value head?

The existence of the narrative is required to extract meaning from the fractured non-commentary.

Narrative

Narratives…

From tweets to four years in office, they all must have one.

Or else they don’t.

In which case the narrative is the absence of a narrative.

The question I would pose to them is how can you wrap a narrative around a void?

Maybe that’s the narrative.

It’s making my head spin.

And you can’t really spin in an empty universe so even that needs a narrative.

Consensual

Wisdom derives from deep and immediate understanding, whereas grace is using your wisdom to know when and how to do nothing until something must be done.

Fracking hell

An industry insider told me that the rough plan of action for gas was:

1. Starting with our 175 years of supply at estimated rates of domestic usage
2. Export our gas so that the price of local supply goes up substantially
3. This will create the political support required to frack for gas so prices go down again

Simple!

Interior monologue