Recently had a dream, in which I was in India. I needed to meet somebody important in some remote area. With great difficulty I purchased a train ticket and boarded a train. For some reason I was riding right on the top of the steam locomotive that was moving with great speed. I decided to check my ticket, and as I took it out of my wallet, a gust wind ripped the ticket out of my hand. I started thinking about what to do, but the ticket continued flying right behind me, flapping in the wind. I made sure there was no tunnel ahead, stood up and caught the ticket. It wasn’t the original ticket but a copy, but it was just as good. Just as that happened, I realized that the train got lost. It wasn’t a big deal though – it missed a turn and looped back. I remembered the road and would have been able to tell the machinist where to turn.
Month: October 2008
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Closures
Since closures are the hottest thing in computer programming these days, I ordered a whole box of them:
I am still waiting for that box of lisp parens.
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Just DOITT
Whenever I see New York City parking signs, I’m always reminded of this Futurama quote:
“Tour Guide: I direct your attention to this ancient and mysterious tablet which has yet to be deciphered.
[He points to a parking sign. Leela turns to Fry.]
Leela: Do you know what it means?
Fry: Yeah, I asked a cop once. It means “Up yours, kid”.”
The parking signs are indeed mysterious: for instance does 7am-7pm refer to unauthorized vehicles? One thing I can tell you – DOITT means Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and probably refers to which NYC government fiefdom is allowed to park on that street.
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McCain and Palin Condoms
I do not like the Democratic and Republican candidates, and planning to spend my vote in the only way that it can make a difference in New York: voting for a third party candidate. I haven’t figured out which one – they all seem like losers too…
While tax plans that both Obama and McCain are proposing are not ideal for entrepreneurs, they themselves are lending a helping hand: yesterday in Times Square I’ve seen them help a dude market street meat –
and this enterprising young man was selling $10 McCain-Palin condoms –
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Prius – the perfect drive-by vehicle
The area around WTC 7 where I work has one of the densest concentrations of Toyota Priuses in New York: a lot of them were purchased by the governmental agencies. Whole blocks near Centre street are filled in the followng manner: Prius, Prius, Prius, rusty Dodge Ram, Crown Vic, Prius, Prius, Prius. Yesterday I was almost run over by a Prius double parked near an intersection: it started moving, but it did not register with me because it made no sound at all. Modern cars are very quet, but they all vrooom when starting up, and you kind of epect that from a parked car. This made me remember a scene in The Weeds, where gang leader U-Turn buys himself a Prius because it’s a great car for drive-by shooting: very quiet in electric mode, great for sneaking up on people.
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Me, in portrait form
My friend Chris Andreotti painted a super awesome picture of me:
I think he got pretty much everything right: the absent gaze, the crumpled blue shirt, the hipster glasses. Chris rocks!
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Being Dead Wrong
I like to think that I have a great intuition and am very good at predicting things. I also sometimes feel that I suffer from the Cassandra syndrome, as people don’t listen to my prediction as much as I would like them to.
This made me think about the times when I made ridiculously bad predictions. Here’s a list of what comes to mind off the bat:
1. When I was young I thought that programmers will soon write a computer program for writing computer programs, and that computer programming as a profession does not have much of a future.
2. I thought that architectural drawings will always have to be done by hand, as you can’t print out plans on dot matrix printers (the only printers I’ve seen at the time). I thought, sure, you can program some straight lines and such, but you’ll never get beautiful detailed drawings with all kinds of details.
3. I thought that Handspring would become the dominant player on the handheld market the same way that IBM did: by opening up the peripheral standards.
4. I thought that Diamond Rio would be huuuge and that Diamond Multimedia would become the hottest company ever because they were first on the market with an mp3 player.
5. I thought that Apple would just shrivel up and die, and if not, that I would certainly never completely switch to Macs.
Whewww, man. Those are some doozies. How about you, my readers?
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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.”
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”
In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.
