Archimedes’ Hot Tub

My blog posts have become irregular, as I focus more on Twitter and its instant publishing (I’m a bad systems admin or I’d just add the Twitter feed to this blog). But Ennyman, Ed Newman’s catchy online moniker, keeps posting away, and now has become a source of interest for other bloggers. Two interviewed him just this week.  One, Who is Ennyman?, looks at his eclectic interests, especially his voluminous consumption of books. The other, The Many Faces of Ennyman, focuses on his art.

Microsoft continues to edge closer to the cloud. The next version of Office will feature what is in effect the cloud version 1.0 of perhaps the world’s most popular, profitable desktop software application.

We’ll see more ‘cloudifying’ of Office stories over the next few years. Microsoft will almost certainly continue adding more cloud features to Office. I wonder when my editors will start using the new cloud features to collaboratively edit my stories.

Blockbuster Video is becoming a dud of a business. Forbes, in What Blockbuster’s bankruptcy teaches us about economics, blames it for failing to recognize the innovator’s dilemma:

“Blockbuster concentrated on perfecting its existing service while beating competitors offering the same instead of looking into ways that outsiders might destroy its business model altogether,” writes John Tamny.

Wrong. Way back in the mid-1990s, Blockbuster was exploring how to deliver streaming video directly to customers. Its plan at the time was to use superservers from a startup called Parallan (later purchased by IBM) to handle the distribution. This was pre-Netscape IPO, but still an era when ‘convergence’ of consumer electronics and computing was expected to take over our living rooms (yes, Virginia, technology hype comes in cycles. Temper your hope with cynicism when considering the iPad).

Blockbuster obviously recognized the potential for having its business model destroyed. But the Parallan plan failed, not due to technology so much as the problems of getting distribution rights (or so I was told by my sources; Blockbuster never returned my calls and to my knowledge never publicly discussed the project). What it seems to have missed was the damage a more basic approach could do. Netflix added a return component to the book club/music club model and put a nice Web interface on it. Not nearly as cool as streaming video into the home, but it worked.

The economics lesson, then, is that simple twists take less time and investment (i.e., risk) than visionary leaps.

Some of my recent work looks at forgotten things that can haunt us. For instance, the emotions of techies when projects fail to meet expectations. Or how parking makes us insecure. Then there’s my most recent piece, on those ubiquitous Achilles’ heels, the mechanical key.

Last Suppers keep getting bigger. Two researchers looked at 1,000 years of Last Supper paintings, and found that the size of plates and portions have grown by 69 percent. That’s a lot of calories. Here’s a piece about the work: Growing by Biblical Proportions

It’s obvious that economic success brings the ability to feast more elegantly, which we might expect art to reflect. I wonder if the art also suggests a change in the role of the church. Did it call on us to sacrifice more 1,000 years ago, the time of the Crusades? Did portion sizes correlate with changes in the political influence of the church? Did it reflect a shift in theological understanding? Perhaps we’ve come to believe that Jesus was given a sumptuous Passover meal, just as earlier that week Mary washed his feet with an extravagant amount of nard.
I like the clever use of the humanities to provide a measure of life. I suspect, though, that modern paintings of the Last Supper don’t do justice to the amount of food we could eat. Look at these 1990s paintings by Aleksander Balos and Bohdan Piasecki. Not too much food there.
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Michael Wolff thinks priests get into the business to molest boys. I quote: “This was a driving motivation of priests joining the church: sex with boys.”

I’m not Catholic, and have no idea whether Wolff has any religious leanings. But it’s ‘read less know less’ to say the entire Catholic priesthood is a man-boy love society. It’s like Glenn Beck suggesting the ’social justice’ movement is the same as Communism and Facism (all those far right-wingers look alike, especially when they’re disguised as liberal churchgoers. Or Mormons).

First result on a simple search for statistics about homosexual priests collects a number of references to surveys and thumbnail estimates of the number of gay priests. The highest number suggested credibly is 50 percent. Another references 3,000 pederasty cases, a terribly high number (not that anything higher than zero wouldn’t be terrible). But wait — it estimates twice that many priests are in adult relationships with homosexuals, and four times as many are sleeping with adult women. That’s an awful lot of men acting out to disguise their real longings.
Wolff is a columnist and can’t be expected to temper himself. He’s too busy salivating over the stories breaking about European priest pederasty bringing down the pope. (I wonder what he’ll make of the news out of the Vienna Boys Choir.)
Let’s cry Wolff ourselves — he’s not really saying that only men who like boys become priests. He knows better than that, and knows we do, too. He’s saying all priests are gay, and all gay men want to sleep with boys.

Yeah, okay,  I’m guilty both of a tired pun and twisting his words. Still, I wonder if Newser’s big enough for Wolff to get heat over his absurd generalization.

The week ends on a happy note, as I got word I had stories win two Honorable Mention awards in the annual American Society of Journalists and Authors competition. My essay on Trickle-Up innovation for Fast Company, As the World Turns, was the runner-up for Outstanding Business & Technology Article, while a story I wrote for CIO, How Facebook and Twitter are Changing Data Privacy Rules, was runner-up for Outstanding Trade Article.
I should be thrilled. But I have won something in the ASJA competition three years running, so being runner-up feels like a letdown, even though I didn’t expect to win anything. I am suffering from ‘counterfactual thinking,’ which holds that I am comparing myself to whoever won first, rather than being happy I’m on the podium. I will try to flip this around and get some glow to bask in.

When the earthquake hit Concepcion, I thought to myself, ‘hey,  the same thing happened when Darwin was there.’ I remembered from reading “The Voyage of the Beagle” (still one of the great adventure stories ever written) that observing the upheaval of the earth had helped him form his theory of evolution.  Here’s a link I just saw looking at this bit of trivia.

Goldman Sachs warned that bad press is now one of its ongoing business risks. The Wall Street Journal noted the ‘New Risk’:

In its annual report, the New York company [Goldman]  said “adverse publicity” could have “a negative impact on our reputation and on the morale and performance of our employees, which could adversely affect our businesses and results of operations.”

The Journal refrained from asking whether Goldman’s employees will need raises to keep them from fleeing the firm for all those on Wall Street the press loves. But it did tuck in this note at the end: Goldman Sachs’ board “rejected demands from shareholders that the firm investigate excessive pay and take steps to recoup some of the awards given to executives.” Guess Goldman didn’t read the Supreme Court decision about how business works.

I got a gift card to a major online shopping site today. I had to change my password, since the one I thought was right no longer works. Registered, I went shopping. The major site didn’t have the album I wanted to download (Queen’s 1977 classic, News of the World), though iTunes has it. So I picked a song from the album, and went to buy it. It asked for my password, even though I had just entered it. Sigh. Then I have to check to see if it’s charging my credit card or my gift card, because it doesn’t tell me.  What happened to frictionless shopping?

A guilty confession: I am still hoping for the vision captured in those old Qwest commercials that promised we’d be able to walk into even cramped, cruddy stores and get access to the media we wanted, in Ionic or Doric. Instead, I either have to pick the friction of passwords and limited selection and downloading and burning or the friction of driving to stores and looking for things they don’t stock and coming away empty-handed. Maybe I should just be happy with what I have.