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“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.”

—Walt Disney, American cartoonist, born December 5, 1901

As well he might. Mickey was very good to Walt Disney.

Disney the corporation is perhaps the greatest example of what I call “cultural cancer.” I mean the endless mixing and mutation of literary and visual arts so that the end product is an undifferentiated, timeless mass of “entertainment,” without any possibility of making fine cultural distinctions or understanding the history of ideas. Please do not get me started on the strange effect any approach to the end of the Mickey Mouse copyright has on the United States Congress.

Continue reading “Mickey Mouse and the Jade Rabbit”

“I am responsible only to God and history.” —Francisco Franco, Spanish leader, born December 4, 1892

Fear men like Francisco Franco who are on intimate terms with God and history.

We graduated from the Lean Launchpad Pioneer Valley Fall 2013 at Click Workspace last night. We learned a lot and had a great time during the last twelve weeks. Congratulations to Andy Wollner of uChampion, Dan Nelson of Food on a Truck and Randall Smith of receive.ly. We look forward to hearing more about their fantastic startups.

Many thanks to Paul Silva for getting this up and running, and to Rick Feldman, Jim Mumm, Thom Fox, Joe Gensheimer, and everyone else who helped out. There will be a new session of the Lean Launchpad Pioneer Valley starting in February 2014. Get more info and sign up for the course; you won’t regret it.

We’ve found it pretty hard to actually sell stuff with Facebook Ads. The sweet spot we’ve found is to use FB Ads to attract people to an active, fun Fan Page that appeals to their interests. A Fan Page Like is a pretty direct channel to communicate with actual or potential customers, with lots of opportunity to bring them back to the brand’s website. Here’s a case study of the most successful FB ad campaign we’ve ever run. Crazy Orchid Lady Facebook Campaign

And indeed, as John Phillip Sousa worries in this somewhat overwrought piece about the threat to American civilization of then-new (1906) technologies of recorded music, what of the national chest?

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

Reading

“Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?”

“Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time….

“It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure….

“When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?”

John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 1906

The Last Word

“A lawyer’s dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.”

—Samuel Butler, British poet, born December 4, 1835

“Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?”

—Sir Rowland Hill, English inventor, born December 3, 1795

I couldn’t remember who Sir Rowland was, so I looked him up. He was an educational innovator early in his career, but his greatest work was done in postal reform. Hill transformed a hodge-podge of private services, expensive and poorly managed, into a cheap, fast, efficient communications medium for a society in rapid industrial and commercial development. He received a two-year contract to run the new British Post Office in 1839, and proceeded to lower the cost of a half-ounce of mail first to four pence (about $2.00 in today’s money), and the next year to one penny (about 50 cents). The new penny post was a tremendous success, and served as a model for the rest of the world. We’re at the far end of Hill’s revolution, and “snail mail” seems hopelessly out of date to us, but it was a crucial piece of the development of the modern world.

Continue reading “When Snail Mail Was State of the Art”

“Everyone carries around his own monsters.”

—Richard Pryor, American actor, born December 1, 1940

Interesting piece about the often-repeated story of the automobile saving late nineteenth-early twentieth century cities from drowning in a sea of horse manure. The story is not quite as simple as it’s usually told: cars didn’t become very common until much later, streetcars were an important element, and long-established patterns of street use had to be changed by elaborate propaganda campaigns dedicate to reshaping them. For example, “jaywalking” was invented in the 1910s: only rubes from the country (“jay” is a synonym for “rube”) would do something so naïve as to use the street, now devoted to the automobile, incorrectly.

Continue reading “If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride”

“This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.”

—James Agee, American novelist, born November 27, 1909

Counting Our Blessings

1. Peace. After Veterans Day, I read Barbara Tuchman’s classic account of the origins and first month of World War I, The Guns of August. I’m very thankful for peace. I wish everyone in the world lived in peace.
2. Freedom. We have the right and the ability to say and do pretty much anything we damn well please. We may often wish some of our fellow citizens could be restrained from expressing the awful things they think, but that’s the price. Right now our liberties are under serious threat from governments and corporations taking advantage of technology to infringe on them. It’s an arms race, and we’d better hope that the Internet really does route around obstacles.
3. Diversity. We were in Springfield yesterday. We got to the excellent Panjabi Tadka Restaurant and found it closed. No problem: we just went on over to Pho Saigon Restaurant and had some wonderful Vietnamese food. We are rich because we have new friends and neighbors from all over the world who bring with them new foods, ideas, entrepreneurial energy, words, art, music…
4. Medicine. My partner, the Crazy Orchid Lady, is having some problems with cardiac arrhythmia, so I’ve been learning a bit about remarkable range of heart problems that can be fixed in in a few minutes with relatively safe, non-invasive procedures. By the way, the COL’s electro cardiologist attended medical school in Mumbai.
5. Electricity. Think of how you feel after a few hours without power as a thought experiment. Now try to imagine:
   1. Living in a less developed country where there isn’t reliable electric service. Now you have electricity, now you don’t.
   2. Living in the past before there was any electrical power available.
   3. Living through a major failure of the contemporary electrical grid.

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

Today you’d better be getting ready for Thanksgiving!

Reading

Google “deep learning” Tech: There’s More than One Way to Scan a Cat

“…a front-page New York Times article revealed that after Google fed its ”DistBelief” technology with millions of YouTube videos, the software had learned to recognize the key features of cats….Google’s deep-learning tech works in a hierarchical way, so the bottom-most layer of the neural network can detect changes in color in an image’s pixels, and then the layer above may be able to use that to recognize certain types of edges. After adding successive analysis layers, different branches of the system can develop detection methods for faces, rocking chairs, computers, and so on.

“What stunned Quoc V. Le is that the software has learned to pick out features in things like paper shredders that people can’t easily spot – you’ve seen one shredder, you’ve seen them all, practically. But not so for Google’s monster.”

If this doesn’t terrify you… Google’s computers OUTWIT their humans

The Last Word

“All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

—Charles A. Beard, American historian, born November 27, 1874

“Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.”

—Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist, born November 26, 1857

Saussure was a key figure in modern linguistics and semiotics (the science of signs, sign processes, and communication). This stuff gets very technical very quickly, but the notion that signs (words in the simplest case) have an arbitrary, socially-determined relation with what they signify (things in the simplest case) has been a fruitful one since Saussure proposed it. Semiotics and Deconstructionism were all the rage when I was a pretentious young francophile punk, so I was pleased to find Ferdinand de Saussure among my birthday quotes. Pretty pithy thought, too.

Continue reading “Dead Men Don’t Cash Royalty Checks”

“If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon Creation, I should have recommended something simpler.”

—Alfonso X, Spanish royalty, born November 23, 1221

How Hard Should We Try to Understand the Future?

I once asked a former Fortune 500 CEO why his peers were so indifferent to credible, dire warnings about the future. He reminded me that for most businesses anything beyond the next five years is the far future, which management can afford to ignore. Besides, they believe in their ability to deal with problems as they arise, push them off onto somebody else, or have moved on to other positions. Heigh-ho!

This isn’t stupid: it’s rational to pay attention only to problems you can do something about right now, or at the appropriate time. But it seems worth spending at least some time thinking about what’s coming. Dwight David Eisenhower said that “Plans are nothing; planning is everything,” worth thinking about as the future becomes the present, as it regularly does, and at an accelerating pace.

The realities of demographic change are not well understood. We’re used to thinking in terms of a population explosion, a concept approximately contemporary with double-knit leisure suits and disco. What’s coming is the opposite: declining population is a reality in a number of advanced economies (Japan, notably) already, and will be happening everywhere by the middle of the century on current trends. It will affect societies from top to bottom. No one knows how to think about how to have a growing economy in a world with declining populations. We’re about to find out. One possible hope is discussed in today’s Reading How to Keep the Economy Growing When Our Population Is Not. Research shows that richer social connections increase the ability of groups to find solutions to problems and exchange information. A more connected world, even with lower populations, could harness the creativity of its members better to continue to innovate and create.

Tomorrow in #westernma

Reading  

More Problems with Fewer People

“Zero population growth is a period in future human history that is both hoped-for and feared. If we don’t get to that point, the world could literally become overrun with humans, straining already taxed resources like fresh water and farmland to the breaking point. But with zero population growth, the global economy—heavily reliant on a young and expanding workforce—could collapse. No matter what we hope, according to projections by the United Nations, it’s likely that within the next century, the global population will level off or even shrink….

“There’s another, more fundamental problem that zero or negative population growth poses, though—the transfer of knowledge. We know that when people come together, they tend to create new technologies, skills, and knowledge. Cities are hubs of innovation, universities are great factories of scholarship, and even smaller groups can inspire people to create wonderful things. Perhaps more importantly, the number and strength of our connections are vital for passing knowledge on to others, two recent studies suggest. Without those connections, our society could fall rapidly behind. Fortunately, the research also suggests a way to escape the declining population trap.”

How to Keep the Economy Growing When Our Population Is Not

The Last Word

“We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.”

—Lewis Thomas, American scientist, born November 25, 1913