As humans, we have a pretty good knack for assuming we're the pinnacle of everything, that the world revolves around us. Of course, the rest of the world is only too happy to remind us otherwise on a regular basis.
This Scientific American article fascinated me because it challenges the notion that morality and ethics are a purely human invention. Dogs have their own set of commandments, it turns out, not that different from our own.
(Image)
Love this quote from Seth Godin today:
"Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they only go one way. It's like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backwards, try to slow it down, fight the rotation... and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works."
Spot on.
(Image)
Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The only reason your keyboard follows this convention today is that one of the first typewriter manufacturers fatefully chose this peculiar order (apparently to minimize typebar clashes) back in 1874 and it became the dominant keyboard format. It got locked in, so to speak.
I'm only about 30 pages into You Are Not A Gadget, but already Jaron Lanier has gone over my head with many of his musings about the culture of technology. One area I'm finding fascinating, however, is his thoughts on lock-in.
He describes it this way:
"The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into permanent reality."
Okay. That's a bit dramatic. But what he's saying, I think, is that lock-in -- from the QWERTY keyboard to the MIDI standard in music software to thousands of other standards and conventions we use every day -- narrows our options at the same time it helps spread a technology to more people.
Lanier again:
"Lock-in ... removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance."
Two more examples come to mind as I read that.
One, how advertising agencies and marketing professionals often shut down potentially innovative ideas by resorting to locked-in best practices -- better to follow a templated look or "proven" strategy than take a chance on something different.
And second, the healthcare debate in the US. (If you know me well enough, I can always bring it back to the healthcare debate in the US, LOL.)
Read that last quote by Lanier again and try not to think how perfectly it describes the challenges faced by those who want to change the current system. It's inefficient and unfair to millions of people, there are clearly better ways to offer everyone healthcare, yet attempts at change are painful to watch precisely because the system is so locked in.
I haven't read yet how Lanier proposes countering lock-in but I'll let you know when I do.
How about you? Is lock-in a good thing on balance? If not, how do you unlock?
My parents sold their home.
It's the house they've lived in for 38 years, the one I grew up in. One of my earliest memories -- of my mom taking my brother and me to see our new place one night in 1972 -- and all my childhood and teens are wrapped up in that house.
And yesterday I said goodbye to it for the last time. I walked around all weekend teasing memories from my subconscious, taking in the way everything looked as if I were inhaling a last breath.
To say I had mixed feelings is an understatement. I thought I'd cry as my brother and I and his kids drove away but I didn't. (I do that now, alone, as I type.) Instead I watched my mom arranging things in the garage and was relieved that life would be easier for her and my dad in the new condo. No more dealing with snow piling up on the roof or washing a million windows or running up and down flights of stairs.
Change happens. We can't escape it. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it's exhilarating. Often it's both. How we react to change defines our success. If we fight change, we waste away, we become bitter, cynical, paralyzed, we watch others move ahead, cloaked in our selective memories of the good old days. If we embrace change, however difficult, we're carried with the wave. We can still fondly call on our memories but we don't become entombed by them.
Too often, people and businesses make the mistake of assigning factors to success that, in reality, have little to do with it. Companies hit the jackpot with a product or the way they marketed it and assume every product or marketing campaign from that moment forward must resemble the first. We rigidly follow best practices instead of learning lessons and considering common sense. We do this in politics and religion too. A 2,000-year-old book, a 250 year-old document, even a 30-year-old political philosophy, become immutable, untouchable, dogma. Instead of learning the lessons the original work was meant to address, we worship the person, the paper, the stone, the bricks and mortar.
The irony is the bricks and mortar are not real. The memories -- and the lessons we learn from those memories -- are real. I will never again walk into the house at 370 Sloane Avenue. But lying on that gold shag carpet in the den watching Sonny and Cher or Walter Cronkite, or laughing with my brothers and my mom on her bed during a dozen blackouts, or doing math homework with my dad at the kitchen table, or spending summers reading in the backyard: I can take those memories wherever I go. They'll all be with me long after the bricks and mortar are gone.
I used to wonder how any self-respecting writer or art director came up with some of the monstrous ads out there -- till I realized sometimes the original idea is fine until "creative" clients start making changes.
I'm not sure what the story is with this ad but it's frightful.
In case you can't read it clearly, it's for a credit counseling agency. The image -- straight out of a horror movie, I think -- shows some guy with his eyes photoshopped out and a headline that reads: "Each year more than 100,000 Canadians can't see how to avoid bankruptcy."
Get it? "Can't see." Bahahahahaha.
The organization even uses the image on its website. Geez.
Thoughts? Have any bad ads to share? Send them my way and I'll post the best -- er, worst -- ones.
Self-hating closet-case
conservatives aside, it's easy to forget how far acceptance of gays has come in
our lifetimes. We're reminded in A Single Man, Tom Ford's stunning first foray into directing.
Based on the Christopher
Isherwood novel, and reminiscent of but superior to Gore Vidal’s The City and
The Pillar and Todd Haynes’ Far
From Heaven, the film paints a
sad but exhilarating picture of the post-WWII closet, before Stonewall and AIDS
and Ellen, when being gay was euphemistically called “light in the loafers” and
homosexual relationships could be as normal as they are today but only in
private.
I didn’t see Jeff
Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance this year – he might have deserved it – but
Colin Firth as a man out of place in a world without the love of his life was
the most pitch-perfect portrayal I’ve seen in years.
Since my first 128K Apple IIe back in 1984, I've always loved Apple products. To those who share my admiration, there's no need to explain it. To those of you who don't, simply put, Apple products are esthetically beautiful, well designed, easy to use and cool.
There's always been another reason I loved Apple. It was the underdog. But more than that, it was an underdog that deserved to be number one. And that made me love Apple even more.
But something is happening to the Cupertino-based company on its way to dominance. It's getting dickish. I'd always heard that Steve Jobs was sort of a dick but often, when someone is really great at what he does, you kind of overlook the attitude and bullying (to a point). No successful company or leader, after all, gets to the top by being nice. Sad but true.
Still I'd kind of hoped it wouldn't happen to Apple, whose continued existence is in large part due to the loyalty of customers who stuck with it when no one else would. It's like loaning your friend money when he's going through a rough patch only to see him screw you later when he's back on track.
That's why stories like this and particularly this irritate me. It turns out you won't be able to tether your iPhone to your wifi Ipad. What this means is, should you have both devices, you'd have to buy data plans for each other them. Expensive but, most of all, dickish.
Apple needs to be a little careful. Most of us still love it. But that doesn't mean we won't leave it in the future.
(Image)Every good ad agency, newspaper or publishing company has proofreaders to ensure embarrassing or potentially libelous errors don't end up in print. But as the world goes increasingly digital and blogging becomes more popular, it seems like a lot more grammatical and factual errors are slipping through. The perennial its versus it's is a good example.
So is this. (Read the caption under the photo. I know Hillary has cankles but this is ridiculous!)
Now I know the New York Times isn't what it used to be. But come on. Did no one pick this up? :-)
Don't get me started.
So it was refreshing to read this by Alan Webber, this morning. Because while I liked Bill Gates's recent TED talk on climate change, there was something about it that bugged me. And I agree with Webber: there are no miracles to solving climate change -- or any challenges, big or small. There's simply common sense.
(Image)
