Roblog

Recent posts

  • Filed under: politics

    Trump and collaboration

    Now that the dust is settling – hopefully – on Trump’s time in office, we can begin to reckon with those who collaborated with his regime and his ideology. Who collaborated? Why, and how? What can be learned from other collaborators in the recent past, with Nazism and Communism?

    Writing back in July, Historian Anne Applebaum digs deep in this article. She explains how totalitarianism can take root gradually, and that the nature of collaboration can take many forms – whether that’s misplaced faith, self-delusion, or self-interest. In the end, those who collaborate the closest are often the people you’d least expect to. #

  • A skeptical farmer’s monster message on profitability

    Agriculture isn’t my area of expertise, but if you can parse through the bushels and Chicago prices and bpa dryland yields then there’s a really interesting story here. It’s the story of one farmer questioning received wisdom, choosing long-term profitability over short-term convenience, relentlessly experimenting and learning, and adopting methods from the organic world – lessons that can and should be learned in more industries than just farming. #

  • Filed under: organisations

    The hiring mystery

    All too often, companies treat hiring like a puzzle: gather enough information, conduct a rigorous enough interview process, and you’ll come to an objective conclusion as to whether someone is right. But that flies in the face of even the most obvious understanding of how humans and teams behave. So why do we do it, and what should we do instead?

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Clash of mindsets: puzzles vs. mysteries

    Puzzles are solvable, knowable, with clear rules and objective answers. Mysteries are complex, murky, incapable of resolution. The world is full of both: why is it that we so often fail to distinguish between them? The answer perhaps lies in our mindsets, our biases, and the way we naturally approach problem-solving.

  • Filed under: brands

    The niche multinationals

    For a while, it seemed like the internet would destroy niche businesses, as power became concentrated in ever-fewer large platforms. But the reality is that those platforms themselves have, in reaching such a huge audience, actually helped niche businesses more than they’ve harmed them – and, in fact, allowed ever-narrower niches to be served.

  • Filed under: sociology

    David Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

    David Brooks argues cogently that the nuclear family – 2.0 parents and 2.4 children – is a historical aberration, a blip that worked only in the 1950s and from which society is yet to fully recover.

    It’s a challenging piece, but not without its positivity. Individuals cast adrift by society’s insistence on the nuclear family are, Brooks argues, increasingly finding refuge in “forged families”, kin relationships formed with those outside their immediate, biological family:

    “These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: ‘Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what.’”

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  • Filed under: documentary

    Errol Morris’s “First Person”

    Errol Morris’s landmark documentary series First Person first aired in 2000. The whole series is on YouTube, and it’s well worth watching.

    I wondered how Morris achieved the distinctive directness of his interviews: every subject seems always to be talking straight down the barrel of the lens. It turns out that this is possible with a device of Morris’s own invention, which he dubbed “the Interrotron”. It’s a little like an autocue, and uses mirrors to allow the interview subject to look straight at the camera but also see and make contact with the interviewer. Production designer Steve Hardie – who worked with Morris on several films including Fog of War – explains more. #

  • Filed under: travel

    A 600-Mile Quest to Savor Japan’s Kissaten and Pizza Toast

    Craig Mod walked 1,000km across Japan in search of an institution: the Kissaten (lit. “tea-drinking shops”). These are cafés famous for their “morning service” of coffee, toast, and eggs, and for the true object of Mod’s obsession: pizza toast, which is exactly what you’d expect from the name.

    These kissa are wonderful places of human connection:

    “Canadian Coffee House was only open until noon on Sundays, and it was already 1:30 p.m. The other customers had long since left. It was just Sakai and me chatting away. I apologized for keeping him open longer than expected, and he looked at me like I was nuts. It was his pleasure. This was what kissa were for — community, connection, conversation, strange encounters.”

    …but they’re also dying out, victims of Japan’s aging population, flight to the cities, and general cultural shifts. Mod’s journey is a fitting elegy. #

  • Filed under: communication

    Edward Tufte on PowerPoint

    Edward Tufte at his searing best, dismantling the cult of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is, to Tufte, a singularly useless form of communication: slow, shallow, and thought-corrupting. He uses the tragic example of the Columbia space shuttle disaster to demonstrate the real dangers of reducing complex issues to bullet points.

    “Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues’ time. These side effects, and the resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.”

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  • Filed under: brands

    Amazon, aggregators, and the death of brands

    What happens if Amazon goes the way of Uber and Airbnb, and becomes an "aggregator" – with unlimited product selection, a frictionless service, and an incredible user experience? Should food and drink brands be rubbing their hands with glee – or fearing for their lives?

  • Filed under: coronavirus

    In Search of Lost Time - The American Interest

    Peter Pomerantsev writes perfectly on how the disorienting, time-warping feel of coronavirus is actually just the latest in a slow melting away of the significance of time:

    “We live in a “flat world” where different eras have become squashed together in a mental space where they can’t by definition all fit at the same time, and where there is no History to order them in terms of their level of “development.” Everything is contemporaneous, but with no model of common communication, a synchronization of the incompatible: ISIS and Putin, Trudeau, Kim Kardashian, and Duterte all jostling against each other with no way of saying which represents the past and which the future.”

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  • Filed under: music

    Video game soundtracks, and a format for adaptive long music

    Matt Webb has really been knocking it out of the park lately. His latest is on adaptive long music, with video game music as inspiration:

    Although this gives the impression of a formless improvisational process, because of the way the music reacts in real-time to the player’s actions, the underlying structure had to be meticulously planned. If a dramatic sequence suddenly kicks off, the soundtrack switches to something with greater intensity, while a more foreboding sound is required during moments of suspense.

    …

    I wonder, when I listen to these soundscapes, whether it would be possible to make an album that is intended to be listened to over a full 24 hours, as a kind of live soundtrack to your life?

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  • Filed under: coronavirus

    Epidemic Calculator

    A beautiful and informative data visualisation from Gabriel Goh. It lets you plum in different knowledge about the Coronavirus, and then examine the effect of different interventions at different times. Thanks to the compounding effect of the virus’s transmission, it becomes suddenly clear how quickly even the most powerful interventions can become useless – or how effective early decisions can be. #

  • Filed under: internet

    Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet | WIRED

    A beautiful paean to Wikipedia, one of the few unqualified success stories of the web, one of the last remaining bastions of the anarchic, decentralised spirit of the early internet, and the home of facts about Afghanistan’s only pig. #

  • Filed under: geography

    Khanzir - Wikipedia

    Today I learned that there is – was? – only one, solitary pig in Afghanistan, and his name is Khanzir. #

  • Filed under: crime

    The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist

    How thieves disgruntled at the financial system pulled off an almost-perfect robbery – a real work of art. #

  • Filed under: security

    The Spatial Politics of Geofencing

    Interesting thoughts about Code of Conscience, a project that geo-fences heavy duty vehicles, restricting their usage within protected wilderness areas, and what that technology might mean for policymaking. For example:

    You can easily imagine… a dystopian scenario in which geofenced medical prostheses cease to operate when they cross an invisible GPS boundary into an unserviced region—perhaps as a way to protect the host company from the illegal installation of black-market, security-compromised firmware updates, but with immediate and perhaps fatal health effects on the user. Or, say, regions of a metropolis—perhaps near centers of governance or military installations—where civilian vehicles or unregistered photographic equipment of a particular resolution can no longer physically function.

    Just as easily, you could imagine something like the spatial opposite of Code of Conscience, where, for example, future GPS-tagged hunting rifles only work when they are located inside permitted wilderness areas. The instant you step outside the field or forest, your gun goes dead.

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  • Filed under: security

    The intelligence coup of the century

    For half a century, the CIA secretly controlled one of the world’s most widely used cryptography companies, using that control to backdoor allies and enemies alike and eavesdrop on their most sensitive communications. This perhaps explains their concern about Huawei. #

  • Filed under: journalism

    The high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal

    Geoff Manaugh on a remarkable story of teen journalists in the 1990s uncovering what the “real” press was unable or unwilling to. An example of just what teens are capable of if given a project with meaning, import, and autonomy. #

  • Filed under: psychology

    The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred

    Why do vegans provoke such ire in non-vegans? This interesting article looks at the cognitive biases that might lead to such strong feelings. #

  • Filed under: technology

    Artificial Morality

    Bruce Sterling on AI ethics:

    In the hermetic world of AI ethics, it’s a given that self-driven cars will kill fewer people than we humans do. Why believe that? There’s no evidence for it. It’s merely a cranky aspiration. Life is cheap on traffic-choked American roads — that social bargain is already a hundred years old. If self-driven vehicles doubled the road-fatality rate, and yet cut shipping costs by 90 percent, of course those cars would be deployed.

    …

    Technological proliferation is not a list of principles. It is a deep, multivalent historical process with many radically different stakeholders over many different time-scales. People who invent technology never get to set the rules for what is done with it.

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  • Filed under: politics

    Sayre's law

    Related to the last link is Sayre’s law, which states that “in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake”. We’re distracted by trivialities and are powerless to effect meaningful change. #

  • Filed under: politics

    #distracted – BLDGBLOG

    A piercing view of modern outrage culture, which sees the opposition to fascism distracted by low-stakes nonsense while society is slowly dismantled. #

  • Filed under: sport

    The Unhappy King of Snooker

    From five years ago, but still beautiful and resonant: a profile of Ronnie O’Sullivan, the haunted and preternaturally gifted snooker player. #

  • Filed under: writing

    Elizabeth Wurtzel and the Illusion of Gen-X Success

    A poignant piece on the passing of Elizabeth Wurtzel (author of Prozac Nation) and the precariousness and vapidity of the modern creative industries. #

  • Filed under: politics

    Sn*wflakes and F*ggots

    A wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking article about the growing culture war in the UK, as we slowly circle the drain. #