The Lowbrow Corner

How I Lost a Bet on QR Codes

2011-10-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

Mowingo is running a cool promotion at McDonald's: guests are invited to download Mowingo's application (available for Android and iOS), enjoy a free milkshake and get access to other cool deals.

As you can see in the picture above, we have large posters hanging on the walls at the Embarcadero McDonald's in San Francisco.

The poster invites guest to download the app either by typing a URL on their smartphones, or by scanning a QR code:

Unlike my co-founder, Ehud, I was skeptical about the effectiveness of QR codes.

Boy, was I wrong!

Here are the results for the first week:

Download via URL: 41.3%
Download by scanning QR code: 58.7%

We will see how things develop over the next few weeks, but I must admit I was wrong. QR codes do work!

Startup or Hip Hop? 10% Luck, 20% Skill, 15% Power of Will

2011-05-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

You might be as stunned as I was to discover, courtesy of Fort Minor, parallels between hip hop and tech startups:

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill

Fifteen percent concentrated power of will

Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain

And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!

It’s an almost perfect image: Mike Shinoda has got the ingredients right, but the ratios feel a bit off. I would increase luck and concentrated power of will, at the expense of pain. Watch the clip, listen to the lyrics, tell me if you feel the same, and most importantly: remember the name - Mowingo!

Startup – The 2011 Capital-Efficient Model

2011-05-06T20:44:00.001-07:00

Starting up a tech venture in 2011 is cheaper and easier than ever. My co-founder and I were able to self-finance Mowingo for a long while. Here is how:

Capital Expenditures: the cloud is your friend. My previous company, which I co-founded back in 2003, buried over two million dollars in data centers: we had to buy, install and maintain servers, routers, storage systems, load balancers, backup devices, etc. Mowingo uses the cloud: costless at the start (Amazon Web Services offers a no-fee starter plan,) infinitely scalable, and very inexpensive as your traffic grows. Our only capital expenditure so far: a laptop. Repeat after me: No CapEx!

Software: this is not really a 2011 thing; open source software has been around for a while. Thanks to a variety of open source projects, we can deploy database systems, utilize bug tracking software, enjoy rich development environments, etc. – all at virtually no cost. But in 2011, the wealth of free possibilities is indeed staggering: we use Google Docs for collaboration, shared directories on Dropbox as our Intranet, Skype for all our communications, and as a WebEx substitute we use Adobe’s ConnectNow (free for two participants, extremely cheap if we ever need more.)

Development: get a super-talented technical co-founder and encourage him to burn the midnight oil. Need to hire some extra help? There are offshore companies, with local liaisons right here in Silicon Valley, which offer reliable low cost developments services. Be careful here: selecting the right offshore partner is critical, but once you found it, you’re golden.

QA: finally a justification for procreation: nothing like a teenage daughter to spot bugs in your alpha/beta smartphone application.

Sales and marketing: if neither of the co-founders can sell… you should reconsider this whole entrepreneurship thing. Get a job.

Legal: be your own lawyer (or like me, marry one.) The web has a wealth of standard forms you can use as a starting point: not only templates for sales contracts and employment agreements, but even standard investment documents, such as Ted Wang’s Series Seed Financing Documents. Terms and Conditions? Privacy Policy? That’s what competitors are for. Visit their websites and plagiarize away. Once you are funded, you need to swim with the sharks and get a top-tier law firm; I can say only good things about Fenwick & West. Hire them.

Office space: given the recession and the excess supply in commercial real estate, you can find real bargains. Mowingo went one step further: a friend of mine is hosting us free of charge.

Smartphones for development and demos: they are cheap to buy, but when you have friends in the right places (I do) and you aren’t above begging (I am not) they can even be free.

Recruiting: need a temp sales rep? Post your gig on Craig’s List – they don’t charge you anything for that.

Banking: that’s an easy one: Silicon Valley Bank will offer you a lot of services for free, invite you to countless (free) networking events, and even feed you time and again.

Meals: you don’t need to rely solely on SVB’s food. Turns out angels and VCs can buy you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why pay for your meals, if you can pitch while eating at a potential investor’s expense? OK, maybe I’m stretching it a bit too far here…

Netflix Ruins My Evening and then Insults Me with a $0.24 Credit

2011-03-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

False Alarm

2010-12-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

I am the Email Insider Summit, held at a posh hotel in Utah.

Entering my suite's bathroom, I noticed a red dot staring at me from the mirror on the wall:

Not losing any time, I rapidly ducked down and swiveled back to locate the sniper aiming at me.

There was no sniper.

Turns out there's a TV embedded inside the bathroom's mirror; the red dot signals that the TV is currently off. Here's how it looks like, once you turn it on:

Bottom line: (fortunately) my life is not an action movie.

Don't Use a Do-Not-Reply Email Address

2010-09-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

I hate it when a company or an organization sends me an email from a do-not-reply address. It's stupid and counterproductive. Don't they want to hear back from their customers or audience?

If I could, I would have sent the author of the message below a discreet reply, suggesting that having three typos in a single paragraph does not reflect too well on the school district. But since they don't want to hear from me, as evidenced by the use of a DoNotReply address, I'll vent my frustration on this blog.

My older daughter, now at UC Berkeley, graduated from Gunn High School. My younger daughter is still a student in the Palo Alto Unified School District. They were taught to write better than that.

Exciting times to be an email professional

2010-08-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of years, my colleagues at Goodmail and I have been on a mission - determined to advance email into the 21st century. Our catchy motto was that at the same time the web moved from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0," email moved a couple of steps backwards.

In "Email 0.7," as we dubbed it, delivery is spotty, images are blocked, trust is nonexistent. Our CertifiedEmail product addresses these issues: by guaranteeing delivery of valuable email messages, displaying images and enabling links by default, and by placing a trust mark next to trustworthy messages, we began to restore trust in email.

But we didn't stop there.

Remember your excitement the first time you used Google Maps and you could actually pan and scroll the map using your mouse? If applications can live in web pages, why couldn’t they live inside email messages? The answer is security. The very same technologies that enable cool functionalities can also be used by malicious senders to harm users. To protect their customers, ISPs routinely block each and any active component embedded in incoming email messages. As a result, email remained moored in the 1990s.

But what if ISPs could enhance the user experience and enable advanced functionalities with full confidence that their users won't be exposed to security risks?

Goodmail developed technologies, based on its flagship CertifiedEmail platform, that can do just that.

Over the last few months, Goodmail lead an industry initiative to leverage its unique enhanced email technology, and to introduce interactivity and "Web 2.0" capabilities into email. The interest we generated is enormous, the response from the email ecosystem electrifying, and the very large partners who have so far participated in the initiative extremely gratifying.

These are exciting times for the email ecosystem, Goodmail, and for me.

Daniel T Dreymann
President and Co-Founder

Why Are Jews Liberal?

2009-09-30T18:51:00.001-07:00

I have just finished reading, on my Kindle, Norman Podhoretz's excellent book "Why Are Jews Liberals?"

Podhoretz's Wall Street Journal article, bearing the same title, does a good job summarizing the book, but to form your own opinion, do read the longer essay.

One of the best passages in the book is reproduced almost verbatim in the article:

Of course in speaking of the difference between left and right, or between liberals and conservatives, I have in mind a divide wider than the conflict between Democrats and Republicans and deeper than electoral politics. The great issue between the two political communities is how they feel about the nature of American society. With all exceptions duly noted, I think it fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation shaped by a complex of traditions, principles and institutions that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded—and apologized for to other nations—is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack.

In this realm, too, American Jewry surely belongs with the conservatives rather than the liberals. For the social, political and moral system that liberals wish to transform is the very system in and through which Jews found a home such as they had never discovered in all their forced wanderings throughout the centuries over the face of the earth.

I couldn't agree more.

The reasons behind the historical liberalism of American Jews, as laid down in the book, are almost undisputable. Podhoretz's conclusion as to why Jews remain liberal now is more controversial:

Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

Podhoretz convinced me. Read the book and tell me if he convinced you too.

Ken Is Calling It As It Is

2009-09-30T10:46:00.001-07:00

Ken Magill nails it in an article titled "Stupid Statement Watch: Umm, That’s Not True":

Goodmail is not a way for marketers to buy their way past ISPs’ spam filters. In order to get Goodmail certified, marketers must adhere to certain best practices, among which are avoiding spamming.... to say Goodmail creates a two-tiered system, one for paying spammers and one for everybody else, is ridiculous.

Read the entire article here:
http://directmag.com/magilla/0929-goodmail-rpost-patent-lawsuit/

All In One Click

2009-07-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

From my latest contribution to the CertifiedEmail blog:

One of the most important business rules, whether you sell widgets or services, is that you want to make it easy for customers and prospects to buy from you. This rule certainly applies to e-Commerce on the internet, and it does not pertain just to the sale transaction per-se, but to virtually all interactions between an organization and the individual customers it serves.
Leveraging on Goodmail's CertifiedEmail technology, Goodmail partner, Striata created One-Click, No-Registration, In-Email Payments

Read the entire blog post here.

Another Myth

2009-05-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

What's the deal with mom and pop sports shops? My experience, over the last couple of years, is that, not only do chains offer a better selection, but they also provide a much better service. I have had bad experiences with a couple of bay area bike boutiques. Not bad enough to mention them here by name, but quite disappointing nevertheless.

On the other hand, whenever I visit Sports Basement in Sunnyvale, or Performance Bike in Mountain View, I am getting an A+ service from passionate, knowledgeable and courteous employees. They provide good advice, they fix my bikes, they fit Emma with the optimal wetsuit, and they treat me well.

Go big business!

It’s a Painting of a Girl in a Shell

2009-05-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

After burning through a small stack of physical (i.e. "real") books, I finally got to read on my Kindle 2 a first fun book: the only other item I had purchased for my Kindle is a reference book, which one doesn't read linearly, cover to cover.

The fun book is Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, by Sergio Esposito (yes, he of Italian Wine Merchants). It's a lovely, well-written book. I'm almost done reading it, so I'm slowing down to prolong the joy and delay the inevitable.

The only downside with Passion on the Vine is that it makes me hungry and thirsty, constantly craving hearty food and good wine.

Using the Kindle's "clippings" feature, I can share a passage:

And then there is unjustifiable beauty. It’s personal beauty, imperfection, ambiguity. It’s beauty you cannot argue for because you have no material proof, only your own certainty. This was the magnificence of Bartolo’s wine. It was constantly morphing, evolving, impossible to know entirely. You could experience it an infinite number of times and you would never be able to master it. This was the true beauty, the kind of great art that transcends its time and invites its admirer to continue searching within it for the answer to some unknown question. It wasn't a catchy pop song or a girl in a makeup commercial. You couldn't pin it down by saying it smelled like rose petals. That was as reductive and senseless as looking at The Birth of Venus and saying, “It’s a painting of a girl in a shell.”

CertifiedEmail: Now with DKIM

2009-04-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

When we designed CertifiedEmail, a few years back, there was no suitable standard for digitally signing an email message. Goodmail thus went and used standard components, e.g. RSA for the digital signature, and SHA-1 for hashing a digest, but we were forced to define our own process for combining these components into an authentication layer.

Over the past few years, an email authentication standard emerged: first in the form of DomainKeys, and later, its successor, DKIM.

It was a relatively simple matter for us to substitute DKIM for our original authentication layer. The authentication layer was, and still is, a rather prosaic component of CertifiedEmail. The other security components, the “secret sauce” that made CertifiedEmail the best and the only secure email certification system, remain in place. DKIM-based CertifiedEmail is as secure as the original specification of CertifiedEmail.

By adopting DKIM, not only do we embrace and help further propagate a worthy standard, we also provide our customers with additional value. Beyond the large number of mailboxes operated by providers who agreed contractually to grant privileges to CertifiedEmail messages, senders of CertifiedEmail will now also enjoy improved deliverability with other receivers who value the fact that CertifiedEmail messages are signed by a trusted third party.

You can read the press release (replete with quotes from luminaries and a car safety metaphor) here.

WSJ - Video Gets Entrée Into Email

2009-04-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Read the whole Wall Street Journal article, but let me cherry pick a few gems (mixed metaphors, I know):

Technology From Goodmail Opens a Long-Sought Horizon for Marketers

Video is coming to email.

Email-security firm Goodmail Systems plans to introduce Thursday a new technology to help marketers and media companies send videos via email. It screens video messages for bugs and viruses and emails them to consumers who have opted to receive them. The Mountain View, Calif., start-up is launching its video email service with Time Warner's AOL unit.

Adding video to email marketing boosts customers' interaction -- such as opening the email or clicking on any of the content -- by as much as 200% to 300%

Live Nation will be among the first marketers to test video emails with Goodmail. The concert promoter relies heavily on email marketing, sending 15,000 promotions last year to customers who subscribed to receive updates about events. Adding video to those messages will give Live Nation the chance to better showcase its artists and give consumers a preview of shows, says Bob Frady, the company's vice president of digital marketing. It tested emails featuring video of Katy Perry as part of its efforts to promote the pop singer.

The email newsletter DailyCandy, which covers fashion and culture for a mostly female audience, plans to start sending videos via Goodmail next week. The newsletter, owned by Comcast, will begin producing videos segments to complement its usual fare like shopping tips and restaurant reviews, says Catherine Levene, chief operating officer. It plans to sell short commercial spots to play before the programming starts.

Thrillist, a newsletter which has 750,000 subscribers aimed at young urban men, plans to send video messages only if they have been paid for by advertisers, says founder Ben Lerer. Thrillist said it has sold its first video campaign to camera maker Canon.

The Case Against Fannie and Freddie, as Made in... 1946

2009-02-11T20:31:00.000-08:00

Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to “buy” houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief, in they long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.

From Chapter VI "Credit Diverts Production" in Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson," first published in 1946

HT: Prof. Mark Perry

I got "Economics in One Lesson" as a present for the last holiday season. It was slowly percolating to the top of my stack of books to read; it just jumped to the top.

Paradigm Shifts: It's Not How Many Ideas You Have

2009-01-17T13:59:00.001-08:00

When I started Goodmail, the Accenture consulting group used to run print ads boasting an insightful slogan:

"It's not how many ideas you have. It's how many you make happen."

And that’s indeed the difficult part, making it happen.

Five years into the venture that uprooted me and my family, from the land of milk and honey to the land of unbounded possibilities, it is time to pause, take a step back, and reflect on the journey so far.

So here are some of the topics I might cover in subsequent blog entries:

Hiring: surround yourself with a team of losers and nothing will ever get done. Get the kind of people Joel Spolsky hires and there will be no mountain high enough.

Venture Capitalists: a few geniuses, some talented guys, and so many worthless idiots. Masterminds can be found not only amongst the firms who invested in Goodmail (the best advice I ever got came from a VC who passed on the opportunity), but, taken as a whole, an unimpressive herd.

Marketing: those standing to benefit the most from your product are not necessarily going to be your first customers. Required reading: Crossing the Chasm.

Upton’s theorem: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

OK, But Why the Urge to Share?!

2008-10-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

As spotted yesterday in the school's parking lot:

Idiocracy - Help Not Wanted

2008-04-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

From The Economist:

Consider the annual April Fool's joke played on applicants for H1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor highly-educated foreigners to work in America for three years or so. The powers-that-be have set the number of visas so low—at 85,000—that the annual allotment is taken up as soon as applications open on April 1st. America then deals with the mismatch between supply and demand in the worst possible way, allocating the visas by lottery. The result is that hundreds of thousands of highly qualified people—entrepreneurs who want to start companies, doctors who want to save lives, scientists who want to explore the frontiers of knowledge—are kept waiting on the spin of a roulette wheel and then, more often than not, denied the chance to work in the United States.

This is a policy of national self-sabotage. America has always thrived by attracting talent from the world. Some 70 or so of the 300 Americans who have won Nobel prizes since 1901 were immigrants. Great American companies such as Sun Microsystems, Intel and Google had immigrants among their founders. Immigrants continue to make an outsized contribution to the American economy. About a quarter of information technology (IT) firms in Silicon Valley were founded by Chinese and Indians. Some 40% of American PhDs in science and engineering go to immigrants. A similar proportion of all the patents filed in America are filed by foreigners.

The United States is already paying a price for its failure to adjust to the new world. Talent-challenged technology companies are already being forced to export jobs abroad. Microsoft opened a software development centre in Canada in part because Canada's more liberal laws make it easier to recruit qualified people from around the world. This problem is only going to get worse if America's immigration restrictions are not lifted. The Labour Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2m job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans graduating with degrees in those subjects is plummeting.

How do you win the global talent wars when Congress is already in the hands of the idiocracy?

Hurrah, Big Savings!

2008-02-27T11:46:00.000-08:00

I love Expedia, but I'm afraid I don't share their excitement here:

Click on the scaled-down picture above and you'll see what I mean...

Stuff White People Like

2008-02-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

Stuff White People Like is a funny "anthropological" blog that tells it the way it is:

A few gems:

#60: Toyota Prius
If you see a white person in a Prius you can say “wow, that’s great to see that you’re doing something for the earth.” The white person will feel very good about themselves and offer to drive you home, to Ikea, or drop you off at 80s night.

#62 Knowing what's best for poor people
It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them.

#64: Recycling
Recycling is a part of a larger theme of stuff white people like: saving the earth without having to do that much.

Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape it ain't, but Stuff White People Like makes for a really funny read.

Dear Counselor, a Toast to You

2007-11-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

If we hadn't learnt it online yesterday, the letter Debora just got in the mail would have been even sweeter:

Dear Counselor:

Welcome to the State Bar of California...

Mazel Tov, Debora!

Email Gets Not Respect

2007-09-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

The Email Experience Council, of which Goodmail is a platinum sponsor, petitioned an untold number of publishers not to use a hyphen in the word email. Coincidentally, the Oxford English Dictionary just dropped a lot of hyphens, as reported by the BBC (all quotes below are from the same article):

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog.

In a nicely recursive way, email is denounced as the culprit:

Geoffrey Leech, emeritus professor of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University, agrees that there has been some decline in its use. Data drawn from a wide range of publications taken in 1961 and 1991 suggested a 5% decline in hyphen usage over the three decades. He thinks e-mails may be part of the answer.
"When you are sending e-mails, and you have to type pretty fast, on the whole it's easier to type without hyphens. Ordinary people are not very conscious of the fact of whether they are putting hyphens or not."

But apparently, we still have some lobbying to do:

One battleground is the word e-mail itself. The likes of the BBC and the New York Times are fighting a valiant defence of the hyphen.

Yet To Visit: Latin America and Eastern Europe

2007-07-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

Create your own map: Visited Countries

The Hand Is Not Invisible, The Head is Balaclava-clad

2007-05-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

Languedoc winemakers introduce us to a new way to prop prices up:

The activist wine group CRAV has issued a one-month ultimatum to Nicolas Sarkozy threatening 'action', and possibly deaths, if the new premier does not help the struggling southern French wine industry.... They said that if in one month nothing has changed and that wine prices have not gone up, they will go into action.

I guess I'll stick to Châteauneuf-du-Pape and other Côtes du Rhône wines for a while.

The Progressive's Dilemma

2007-05-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Privacy is sacred... unless it's violated for the Good Green Cause. At the end of a New York Times article about online privacy, one finds this gem:

Hotmapping, a “geo-rectifying” British company, uses spy planes to conduct thermal surveys of some neighborhoods to determine which homes are leaking heat — and therefore, money (hotmapping.co.uk). “Now here’s an invasion of privacy I can really get behind,” writes Chris Taylor, who writes the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. (blogs.business2.com/futureboy) Local governments post thermal maps on the Web. Blue buildings are “cool,” red houses are “hot,” and wasting energy. Owners who do not take action “will be shamed in front of the whole neighborhood as energy hogs,” Mr. Taylor writes. “Green action groups will know which doors to knock on.”

So if you are not only (in Identity Woman's words) an "angry, progressive anticonsumer guy", who cherishes privacy more than convenience and efficiency, but also a Gore disciple, what do you do?!

Breaking News: There Ain't No Freaking Limbo

2007-04-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

This just in from AP:

VATICAN CITY (April 21) - Pope Benedict XVI has reversed centuries of traditional Roman Catholic teaching on limbo, approving a Vatican report released Friday that says there were "serious" grounds to hope that children who die without being baptized can go to heaven.

Are we also losing the expression?! At least the dance lives on ~~(WARNING: not office safe)~~.

The Lives of Other Dreymanns

2007-03-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

Debora and I went this evening to see The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). A masterpiece.

It’s not a funny movie, it’s a drama taking place in Stasi-terrorized East Germany before the wall came down, and yet the movie has its amusing moments. Here’s a joke told by one Stasi officer to another:

Erich Honecker wakes up one morning, opens the curtain, and exclaims: "Good morning, sun!" and the sun replies: "Good morning, Erich!" Then in the afternoon, Honecker says "Good afternoon, sun!" and the sun replies, "Good afternoon, Erich!" Finally, at night, Honecker says to the sun, Good night, sun!" to which the sun replies: "Screw you; I'm in the West now!"

The joke is funny but in the context it’s told in the movie, one can only shiver.

Go watch it!

PS: did you think I would I skip a movie whose main character is named Dreyman(n)?

Organic Food and Maslow's Hierarchy

2007-02-19T19:24:00.000-08:00

Matt Sherman (aka The Only Republican in San Francisco) writes about the amorality of organic food. I particularly liked this sentence:

In the rich West, we've moved far enough up Maslow's hierarchy that we can eat not just for sustenance, but for self-esteem.

Matt ends his post with an embedded Penn & Teller video featuring Dr. Norman Borlaug. This reminded me of a less entertaining but thought provoking article published by The Economist a couple of months ago (bolding is mine):

Perhaps the most eminent critic of organic farming is Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution”, winner of the Nobel peace prize and an outspoken advocate of the use of synthetic fertilisers to increase crop yields. He claims the idea that organic farming is better for the environment is “ridiculous” because organic farming produces lower yields and therefore requires more land under cultivation to produce the same amount of food. Thanks to synthetic fertilisers, Mr Borlaug points out, global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation. The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contends, the more room you have left for rainforest.

Something to keep in mind during your next trip to Whole Foods or when you read one of their essays on sustainability.

How the Bulls Stole Wall Street's Calendar

2006-12-31T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal was a year ahead of itself with a December 2006 Page One article titled:

How the Bulls Stole Wall Street
Behind 2007's Late Surge,
Deals, Profits and the Fed;
Expect the Same Next Year?

Already corrected in the online version:

Internet in the Desert

2006-12-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

We spent a night in Death Valley on our way to Las Vegas. Sin City and Mother Nature are a curious combination for a family vacation but I wanted to break the long journey from the San Francisco Bay Area to Las Vegas.

We stayed at the Panamint Springs Resort. Water comes from a local well, electricity from a diesel generator; there is no telephone and, you guessed it, no cell coverage.

What they do have at Panamint Springs is a restaurant with reasonable food, extremely friendly service, and… internet connectivity! A bunch of WiFi access points, connected to a VSAT satellite dish, provide a free internet connection to the motel’s guests.

Bandwidth was reasonable, latency acceptable, and the nerd factor priceless.

KQED - Fair and Balanced

2006-11-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

The local affiliate of NPR is the only radio station in the bay area with intelligent programming actually worthy of one’s time. Their political bias, however, is not even thinly veiled. Here’s a sample:

It's Your World (formerly World Affairs Council)
Airtime: Tue, October 31, 2006 -- 2:00am

What Are Americans Voting For? -- This discussion focuses on what matters to Americans as they head to the polls this November. The panel includes Joan Blades ("The Motherhood Manifesto"), cofounder of Moveon.org; George Lakoff ("Don't Think of an Elephant"), professor of cognitive linguistics at UC-Berkeley; Markos Moulitsas ("Crashing the Gates"), founder of The Daily Kos blog; and Robert Reich ("Reason"), secretary of labor under President Clinton and public policy professor at UC-Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Moderated by Bruce Cain, director of the UC Washington Center and the Institute of Governmental Studies.

So we have the moderate left (Reich), progressive left (Lakoff), radical left (Moulitas), and the ultra-left (Blades)… I guess we’ve got the entire bay area political spectrum covered!

Miracle #5

2006-10-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

Early in the life of Goodmail, several skeptical investors told us that our plans made a lot of sense but were so audacious that a series of miracles would be required to accomplish them.

Richard relishes in telling people how one VC had told him: "You will need to pull seven miracles in a row".

Here is miracle #5, I convinced Stephan to dress up for a technical implementation meeting at a major bank:

An Alternative to Jenny Craig

2006-09-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

Rather than suffering like Kirstie Alley, we can now all do it Katie Couric style:

More details here: Slimming photos with HP digital cameras

Labor Day Weekend - A Couple of Recommendations

2006-09-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

You think I'm over the hill
You think I'm past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin' good time

Over the hill? Past his prime? No way!

Amazon shipped me Bob Dylan’s latest album (released last week) – just in time for the Labor Day weekend. Modern Times is a real masterpiece and I bet several songs will find their way into subsequent “Dylan’s greatest hits” CDs. Dylan at his best: lyrics, music and delivery. I’ve been playing it nonstop for the last two days, with short interruptions for Johnny Cash’s creepy but superb cover of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.

To satisfy another sense, we spent the afternoon at the Legion of Honor to see Monet in Normandy. Fabulous paintings. I’m probably giving away my engineering bent by disclosing my favorite painting is Road at La Cavée, Pourville.

What Happens When a Fly Falls Into a Cup of Coffee

2006-08-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Englishman:
Throws his cup in disgust and walks away.

American:
Removes the insect and drinks the coffee.

Chinese:
Eats the insect and throws the coffee away.

Israeli:
Sells the coffee to the American and the insect to the Chinese and gets himself a new cup of coffee.

Palestinian:
Accuses the Israeli for throwing the insect into his coffee.
Takes a loan from the EU to buy a new coffee.
Uses the loan money to buy explosives.
Blows up the coffee shop in which the Englishman, the American, and the Chinese are busy telling the Israeli that he is too aggressive.

Many adaptations of the above run on the Internet (including variations in which the Israeli is the villain) but this one is my favorite.

Back From Israel

2006-08-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

Nothing much to report. In Tel Aviv the war was only on TV, much like in the USA. My daughters, Noa and Emma, did go twice to a bomb shelter when the siren sounded while they were staying with their aunt in Yokneam.

Here are some pictures: Eating Hummus, Watching a Soccer Game, Tel Aviv Beach with Debora and my Nieces, Jerusalem - Western Wall, NOT Smoking a Cigarette (while visiting my brother).

My brother is still on the Israeli Lebanese border with his paratroopers reserve unit. May he return home safely soon.

Do Not Call Registry in Lebanon?

2006-07-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal writes (PDF): “Lebanese residents below the Litani River reported getting telemarketer-style automated phone calls from Israel telling them to flee north”. Makes me wonder whether Lebanon has a National Do Not Call registry...

Almost Like Being There

2006-07-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

For Israeli expatriates these are difficult times to be thousands of miles away. One thing that makes it a little bit easier is See Israel: for $25/month one can watch Israeli TV on his PC. Ten channels, including all major stations (1, 2, and 10), are broadcast in real-time. Broadcasts are presented in lower (500 kbps) and higher (750 kbps) quality. As IP streaming goes, image quality is excellent (comparable to VHS), the delay minimal and hiccups extremely rare.

Sand Hill Road

2006-06-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

I took Interstate 280 to San Francisco last weekend. As I passed the Sand Hill Road exit, summer memories came flashing back. There were weeks during our fund raising period in which every single day included a trip to one or more venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road.

Back then, while racing Richard on the fifteen minute drive from Mountain View, I remember reflecting about this newly acquired routine. “Why am I making this daily pilgrimage to Sand Hill Road?” I wondered.

Willie Sutton, the bank robber, quickly came to mind. As Sutton is rumored to say when asked why he robbed banks, “because that's where the money is.”

Wet Sonata

2006-05-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

Driving out to pick up Noa, I thought for a moment that the Jiffy Lube next to my house had introduced a new gimmick - a water fountain:

Getting a bit closer, mystery solved:

That's one wet (Hyundai) Sonata:

Click here for a short video (QuickTime)

The Dogs Bark...

2006-05-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

...but the caravan moves on.

If the caravan is CertifiedEmail, who are the dogs?

Dumber, But More Opinionated

2006-04-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

Ever since reading Portnoy's Complaint, when I was twenty or so, I became a Philip Roth fan. So it was with great expectations we watched The Human Stain on DVD yesterday. It wasn't a great movie but it certainly was a good one.

Though I bought the book a couple years back, I never got to read it. Debora did and she tells me the book has additional layers and subplots that make it even more enjoyable.

Near the end of the movie, Ernestine (sister of the main character) says:

People are just getting dumber, but more opinionated.

A quick search (isn't Amazon's Search Inside feature great?) revealed this phrase is not in the book. I guess we owe the line to Nicholas Meyer who's credited for the screenplay. "Dumb and opinionated" is a lethal combination.

WSJ: Sharon's Vision Is Taking Hold

2006-03-25T09:49:00.000-08:00

At the top of The Wall Street Journal’s front page, this headline:

As Israel Votes, Sharon's Vision Is Taking Hold

... and just next to it: an eye chart!

Is it only me, or an editor with a subtle sense of humor?

Respect: Relativism and Patronization

2006-03-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian, is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. His Op-Ed on Atheism, written for the New York Times, is centered on a thesis best summarized in this sentence:

The paradox is that [European] Muslims' only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them.

Zizek’s Op-Ed is a worthy read; a couple of paragraphs grabbed me tenaciously. In my mind these paragraphs capture the essence of the Israeli left’s phoniness:

While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth.

What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

This is spot on. Over the course of the last decades, the Israeli left tolerated the violation of agreements, ignored hateful speeches by “peace partners” and justified vile terrorist actions using a mixture of relativism and patronization. Since intellectual honesty is not a forte of their milieu, I doubt that reading the op-ed will change their ways or that the Israeli left will even make an attempt to connect the dots. I did.

Mercury News Editorial

2006-03-10T18:55:00.000-08:00

The Mercury News published my response to their March 5 editorial. Copied on Certifiably Yours and here for your convenience.

Daniel

Dear Editor,

Your editorial of March 5, “Paid e-mail will lead to separate, unequal systems”, is fraught with flawed logic. Not only did you get the economics wrong but, more importantly, your editorial thoroughly ignores and neglects the only actor that should matter in this play: the consumer.

The consumer:
In a perfect world, customers are not phished, spam doesn’t exist, and legitimate messages are never caught in spam filters. We don’t live in this utopian world. Truth is that a vast majority of consumers would rather lose a message occasionally than be spammed and phished to death. ISPs, such as AOL, and mailbox providers (Yahoo!, Hotmail, others) heeded the call and installed filters. Filters are invariably imperfect and good messages mistakenly blocked or mislabeled are the inevitable collateral damage resulting from the war against spam and against phishing. CertifiedEmail is nothing but a tool that helps reduce this collateral damage, restoring trust to the medium.

Consumers and brands alike seek protection from phishing. Experts often can’t tell apart a legitimate message from a phishing attempt. What is the average consumer to do? Use the internet less? Never use on-line banking? Abandon e-commerce? Donate to the American Red Cross through paper mail? CertifiedEmail restores trust in the channel. With CertifiedEmail, Joe can trust that the bank statement is indeed from his bank; Jane can click-to-donate, knowing her money goes to the Red Cross and not to an evil crook.

On the economics:
There is nothing perverse about charging for a service and there is nothing more egalitarian than charging volume senders based on their volume. For a mailbox provider, the costs associated with our service scale with volume; asking a national retailer with a mailing list of 4 million addresses to pay the same as a little bike shop with a list of 10,000 faithful customers makes no sense at all. Do you really want mom and pop shops to subsidize national retail chains? As an analogy, you probably know that most volume senders outsource their email campaigns to Email Service Providers (ESPs) who send email messages on their behalf. Paying a volume-based fee is not one of the models there, it is the only model.
Any wanted message that is not delivered hurts the sender, the recipient and, consequentially, the recipient’s mailbox provider. Purposely degrading treatment of non-certified message makes no economic sense for a mailbox provider: any revenue from CertifiedEmail will be dwarfed by losses stemming from churn with dissatisfied customers leaving the mailbox provider in droves and switching to one of hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors. It is thus ludicrous to claim that adopting CertifiedEmail is synonymous with worsening the treatment of non-certified messages.

On the technology:
You write “The costs of certifying a sender are largely fixed. So the only reason to keep charging a sender who's already been vetted is to turn e-mail into a cash cow.” Nothing could be further from the truth. To provide the level of safety and integrity CertifiedEmail was designed to achieve, one needs to track messages individually and to put in place the other mechanisms we built. Your “fixed price, one time vetting” solution presumes a certificate authority can issue a certificate of goodness and then leave the stage. There would be a long queue of buyers for an unlimited license to spam and phish–at any price.

The certificate proposal is the worst possible solution for small senders. A certificate that provides unlimited privileges would be also unobtainable for most senders. An egalitarian certificate that provides privileges commensurate with a risk assessment, monitored in real-time and tied to volume, is well … CertifiedEmail.

A one-time accreditation is only the first step with the CertifiedEmail service. Privileges and token allocations are assigned carefully; each message is individually tracked; sending and complaint profiles are built and monitored; alerts are issued; privileges are revoked – all to safeguard the system’s integrity and to protect the consumer on the receiving end. Furthermore, to protect privacy, it is all done without Goodmail being ever exposed to message content or to recipient addresses. Can you see the difference between your simplistic Panglossian certification proposal and the solution we actually deployed?

Sunday’s editorial ends with the sentence “… a plan that could threaten the free and open nature of the Internet's killer application.” Using a hysterical tone when discussing email seems to be a pattern with your newspaper. Back in November 24, 2004, you ran an editorial titled “Exterminate spam or the Internet dies”. This recurring theme, playing the alarmist and pre-announcing the Internet’s death, might sell newspapers but does not really help foster a serious debate. It is almost humorous to note you cried wolf both on the problem and on the solution.

Sincerely,

Daniel Dreymann
Co-Founder and Senior Vice President
Goodmail Systems

Stop HBO's Cable Tax!

2006-03-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

Micah Sifry blogged about my company on the Personal Democracy Forum website. He ended his post, Another Side to the Goodmail Debate?, with the sentence "What do you think?". Here is what I think (cross-posted as a comment there): [Note: Cindy is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn]

The EFF’s crusade is about opposing innovation, limiting choices and preventing mailbox providers from protecting their customers.

In Cindy's imaginary world, mailboxes are not filled with junk, phishing and identity theft do not exist, legitimate messages are not caught in spam filters and email is still the great medium it used to be ten years ago -- before spammers and scammers took it away from all of us. In her imaginary world, the internet is free (not only as in free speech but also as in free beer); mail servers, bandwidth capacity, storage and sysadmin services are all manna, I guess.

Ask most experts in the email and anti-spam community and they will tell you that when it comes to email, the EFF is clueless. Cindy opposed CAN-SPAM, and is against spam filters unless these can be made to never, ever, make a mistake (again living in fantasyland).

To Cindy’s dismay, the American consumer *demands* spam filtering. A mailbox provider who chooses to deliver unfiltered mail will face an exodus of customers, seeking a protected mailbox elsewhere. With filtering, false positives (the mistaken labeling of a legitimate message as spam) and false negatives (letting a phishing message go through) are inevitable. CertifiedEmail is one solution to this problem.

Consumers and brands alike seek protection from phishing. Experts often can’t tell apart a legitimate message from a phishing attempt. What is the average consumer to do? Use the internet less? Never use on-line banking? Abandon e-commerce? Donate to the American Red Cross through snail mail? CertifiedEmail restores trust in the channel. With CertifiedEmail, Joe can trust that the bank statement is indeed from his bank, Jane can click-to-donate, knowing her money goes to the Red Cross and not to an evil crook.

The “electronic postage” concept was once championed by no other than Brad Templeton, the EFF chairman: "E-stamps ... Recommendation: Support as long-term solution"
(http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/spamsol.html)

How can the idea be so evil now if it was once the EFF’s very own recommendation? Why portray it as a tax?!

Email is an ultra-competitive market with hundreds of mailbox providers offering free or paying services, why can’t the EFF let AOL users vote with their feet and wallets if they like the service they get?!

I once had a lot of respect for the EFF as I believed they were on the right side of things for most non-email-related issues. Their recently demonstrated total lack of intellectual integrity and the recourse to the tax demagogy have irreparably eroded that respect. It is now clear to me they subscribe to the notion that the cause justifies the means. Using the catchy but purposely misleading “tax” terminology is not something an honorable institution would do.

Taxes are inevitable and imposed by governments. CertifiedEmail is about choice. This is an email tax just like HBO is a cable tax.

Daniel Dreymann, Goodmail Systems

PS: I wish I could claim credit for it but the HBO simile is not mine(http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/4712).

By DTD at Sat, 03/04/2006 - 13:20

What do you think?

Silicon Valley Communists

2006-02-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

Andrew Keen writes in the Weekly Standard (also available at CBS News) about the technology-driven utopian bullshit that serves as currency for some here in Silicon Valley:

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley.

A typical passage:

The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music. It is technology that enables anyone with a computer to become an author, a film director, or a musician. This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates's nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.

"This is historic," my friend promised me. "We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media." Welcome to Web 2.0.

Buzzwords from the old dot.com era — like "cool," "eyeballs," or "burn rate" — have been replaced in Web 2.0 by language that is simultaneously more militant and absurd: Empowering citizen media, radically democratize, smash elitism, content redistribution, authentic community … This sociological jargon, once the preserve of the hippie counterculture, has now become the lexicon of new media capitalism.

Yet this entrepreneur owns a $4 million house a few blocks from Steve Jobs's house. He vacations in the South Pacific. His children attend the most exclusive private academy on the peninsula. But for all of this he sounds more like a cultural Marxist — a disciple of Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse — than a capitalist with an MBA from Stanford.

It is a worthy read but if you can't spare ten minutes then the "cliffs notes" version will do: read The new narcissism on Nick Carr's blog. As Carr puts it:

Beware of those who come with money and influence and pretty-sounding abstractions and who are utterly unaware that what they so joyfully seek to impose on the world is their own reckless banality.

Matt Blumberg Apologizes

2006-02-09T22:25:00.000-08:00

Ted Leonsis, AOL's legendary Vice Chairman, has started blogging.

One of his first public posts includes statements that are music to my ears:

We did [CertifiedEmail] because we compared the various options, and Goodmail had the best system to reduce spam while increasing the value of e-mail for businesses. If you listen closely, however, you'll hear the sound of a lot of sour grapes being squashed by Goodmail's competitors. They didn't like our decision to go with another company, but we think you will.

It is almost as gratifying to read Return Path's Matt Blumberg's comment ending with:

We have no sour grapes... bla-bla-bla, I apologize for any misunderstanding around our comments on this topic.
Matt Blumberg Chairman & CEO Return Path, Inc.
Comment by Matt Blumberg on February 9, 2006 3:04 PM

My Dialogue with Nicholas Carr

2006-02-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Carr, following up on Saul Hansell's piece in the New York Times, wrote an interesting entry and posted it on his blog: The net's killer app.

Reproduced below is the dialog Nick and I maitained in the comments section of his blog.

Hi Nick,
I’m a co-founder of Goodmail and an avid reader of your blog (http://dreymann.blogspot.com/2005/10/religion-920.html).
I am quite puzzled when people associate net neutrality with CertifiedEmail. Net neutrality is about allowing me, as a customer, to stream my videos from Google if I chose to, or download images from Flickr (if that’s what I’d rather do). Those are transactions initiated by me, the customer. I am already paying my telco/cable for internet access; I should be able to grab data from whatever corner of the internet I fancy.
Until the introduction of the first stamp in the UK in the 1830’s, postal systems were based on a recipient pay model. If you wanted to get a letter delivered to you, you had to pay the postman. Imagine the post office would require you to pay for all the unsolicited credit card offers you must get daily!
In all type of communications, “calling party pays” is the winning model. One could argue that the reason the US was a laggard in the mobile phone arena was the decision to charge users for incoming “air time”, rather than charging the callers. GSM took the approach of always charging the caller and making incoming calls free; mobile phones minutes in Europe and Asia soon dwarfed US usage. We could rename “calling party pays” to “initiator pay”; this terminology change would address the debate about net neutrality.
Email is not a pull medium. Messages are pushed to consumers. There is no absolute mechanism to assess whether a message is wanted by its intended recipient or not. The mailbox belongs to the recipient. This is why anti-spam filters applied by ISPs, for years now, are legitimate – they’re trying to keep the bad stuff out of their customers’ mailboxes. Spammers have tried to cry “net neutrality” and make filters illegal -- they lost. Consumers don’t want their messages and are happy when their providers block spam, viruses and phishing attempts. I believe courts have blessed this practice of filtering messages in several precedent setting rulings.
Problem is: no filter is perfect. Bad messages go through and “phish” innocent users. Good and wanted messages are blocked (just look at the caption for the NYT graphics: "Of legitimate commercial email, 20 percent is caught in spam filters and not delivered or sent to junk mail folders").
The CertifiedEmail service guarantees good messages are not blocked and lets the recipient tell apart real bank statements from phishing attempts. A good thing, isn’t it?
This is a premium service. Bulk senders are not forced to take advantage of it. If they want to assure delivery of their messages and to relay authenticity to their customers – they will. Senders that want to keep using the current probabilistic system certainly can.
Best,
Daniel

Comment above posted by: Daniel Dreymann at February 4, 2006 05:43 PM

Daniel,Thanks very much for your message. I agree that what you're doing is different from what's usually meant in discussions of potential infringements of net neutrality. And it's a good business idea (if you can pull it off). But I think your "puzzlement" about why "people associate net neutrality with CertifiedEmail" is a rhetorical kind of puzzlement. I don't think net neutrality just means freedom of access for the user. I think it means that the network, and those organizations that control it, are neutral about the content flowing through it. When you speak of your service being a "premium service," you're talking about drawing distinctions between different kinds of content flowing through the network. That doesn't mean it's not a valuable service; it just means that it requires something other than pure network neutrality to work. No?

Comment above posted by: Nick at February 4, 2006 10:35 PM

Nick, as you agree that what Goodmail is doing is different from what’s usually meant in discussions of potential infringements of net neutrality, I am no longer puzzled (rhetorically or otherwise). In the email world distinctions are already drawn between “different kinds of content flowing through the network”. There is an overwhelming consensus against being neutral about spam and phishing: filters are using artificial intelligence and manually tweaked whitelists and blacklists in an attempt to route messages about "herbal Viagra" to the spam folder, and legitimate messages from pharmaceutical companies to the inbox. Our endeavor is to do the same in a more rational way and with much better results. So, the answer to your question is: yes, it does require something other than pure network neutrality to work, but in the email space this pure network neutrality is long gone.

Comment above posted by: Daniel Dreymann at February 5, 2006 01:59 PM

Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?

2006-01-29T18:28:00.000-08:00

One of the wittiest ads I've ever seen is an Air France full page advertisement that caught my eye a decade or so ago: a handsome business traveler sits on an airplane next to a drop dead gorgeous woman. They are smiling to each other as they clink their Champagne glasses. The caption: as there's virtually no chance this will ever happen to you, you’d be happy to learn we have increased the distance between seats in Business Class by a couple of inches. I'm quoting from memory, totally inaccurate but you get the gist: if you are traveling alone, don’t count on a miracle by which your next seat neighbor will be the person of your dreams.

As you might know, I can relate to the statement above...

Turns out there's a business opportunity here--one that AirTroduction seized.

Here's how USA Today describes their service:

The idea is to connect like-minded fliers--either in the personal or professional realms--who are traveling on the same flights. Here's how it works: Travelers join AirTroductions for free and post personal and/or business profiles. Then, before taking a flight, they enter their itineraries and are notified of other members booked on the same flight. They're given the option of sending anonymous e-mail through the site (at which point a $5 fee kicks in) to determine whether they want to meet at the airport, and, if mutually acceptable, get reassigned to adjoining seats.

But this quote from Newsday captures the idea best:

“It's 14 hours to Tokyo... would I pay $5.00 to sit next to someone who doesn't drool on me?”

WAAAAAAY Too Highbrow

2006-01-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

The Martha Graham Dance Company performed at Stanford yesterday night. The family decided to go; Debora had fond memories from their performance in Tel Aviv eons ago. Usually I'm exempt from attending such events dedicated to cultivated persons. This time however, Debora and the girls were unanimous: "we take the brute with us".

What can I say? The choreography was boring, the symbolisms probably plentiful but beyond my lowbrow grasp, the movement graceless, the costumes ugly, the sets uninspiring, and the music... well it was literally painful. You can tell that I had a ball.

By coincidence, my good friend Levy Cohen and his wife were there too. They did enjoy the show. Something must be wrong with me I guess...

The guy behind us overheard me speaking Hebrew with Emma during the intermission. He engaged in a conversation; turns out he is Stanford's vice provost and dean of research and graduate policy. He too enjoyed the show more than yours truly. Click here and you'll realize he has at least one good reason to like ballet.

Kosher is "the Real Thing"

2006-01-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

A letter to the editor as published in the Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2006:

Notwithstanding Coca-Cola's assertion to the contrary, domestic and foreign Coca-Cola taste very different, with the domestic variety tasting syrupy. One can conduct his or her own taste test by comparing regular Coca-Cola with Kosher for Passover Coca-Cola, which can be purchased in late March and April in many cities with Jewish communities. Because corn syrup isn't kosher for Passover, Kosher for Passover Coca-Cola is sweetened with sugar, thus allowing us, for a few weeks each year, to drink "the Real Thing."

Ronald E. Minsk
Atlanta

I don't care - I drink Diet Coke :-)

Got rBST Milk?

2006-01-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

In the mornings, I'm too lazy to go out and pick up the newspaper from my front yard before having breakfast; I grab it later on my way to the car. As my daughters don't always tolerate my laptop's presence on the kitchen table, I am sometimes reduced to reading the fine print on cereal boxes...

Yesterday, I read the label on the milk bottle. In the upper corner: "From cows not treated with the GROWTH HORMONE rBST", and in fine print at the bottom of the label: "Federal tests have proven that no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST and non rBST treated cows."

While no substantial evidence is available that radiation from mobile phones has any negative effect on our health, authorities do not claim that radiation has been proven to be harmless. So, it is still legitimate to play to the public's fears and market a phone as "radiates less than brand X". But proven is exactly what the milk label says!

Seems to me that cynical marketers no longer try to rely on scientific uncertainty; they now harness to their campaigns even facts proven to be totally irrelevant.

So here is one of my own:

This blog has been produced on a QWERTY keyboard(*)

(*) Federal tests have proven that no significant difference has been shown between blogs produced on QWERTY keyboards and blogs produced on other keyboards.

Idiots and Lunatics

2006-01-15T22:11:00.000-08:00

I guess the execution of this policy was not flawless:
The more general Immigration Act of 1882 levied a head tax of fifty cents on each immigrant and blocked (or excluded) the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and persons likely to become a public charge.

(from http://uscis.gov/graphics/aboutus/history/articles/oview.htm)

Cacology

2006-01-02T18:55:00.000-08:00

No more excuses. Armed with Katherine's gift, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate, I'll pursue peripatetically the tortuous path one takes to provide torturous treatment to indefatigable blathering cacographers.

Cats Aren't Dogs

2006-01-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

Among the gifts I got from Richard for the holidays was an amazing little book named Instructoart. It is filled with entertaining colorful pieces of "advice", all aesthetically packaged. As Richard's accompanying note pointed out that this is fodder for my blog, here's an excerpt. Interestingly, I chose to reproduce a part of an atypically verbose and colorless page...

It's amazing to me, that a creature that does its business in a box for everyone to see and smell can act like their shit doesn't stink.

CATS ARE LIKE THE FRENCH OF THE ANIMAL WORLD
Even cat owners will say, "my cat is so good, he's just like a dog." I wonder how cats got this superior attitude, that they are better than other pets.

Is it because they are part of the cat family and lions are kings of the jungle? Like there is some sort of trickle down effect.

Well, here's a news flash kitties--lions are kings of the jungle because they can kill everyone else. THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.

Juggling Chainsaws

2006-01-01T15:44:00.000-08:00

I did not do anything spectacular to celebrate the new year. I did however catch up on my newspaper backlog and found the one thing I would have done if in Rhode Island yesterday night:

At the Providence Performing Arts Center... is the Passing Zone, a two-man juggling act; they juggle everything from bowling balls to chainsaws.

Big Brain = Small Balls?

2005-12-09T14:32:00.000-08:00

Female behavior and its influence on males:

... where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. ... where the females were monogamous, the situation was reversed. Male fidelity appeared to have no influence over testes or brain size.

Don't get excited, we're talking about bat species here.

A Talmudic Cab Ride

2005-12-08T22:32:00.000-08:00

Carl Bialik devotes his The Numbers Guy column in today's WSJ to an interesting problem:

Three economists get into a cab. They're each getting off at different places along the route. How should they split the bill?

It's not a joke but an everyday numbers dilemma, and it highlights some important economic principles. I asked several economists to solve the problem, and they came up with some unique approaches. One called on the work of game-theory pioneer John Nash (the inspiration for "A Beautiful Mind") to divide up the bill. Another referenced the ancient Jewish legal text, the Talmud.

Answers were all over the place and reflected different notions of fairness and approaches to bargaining. I may use it as an interview question :-)

FedEx - What's in a Logo?

2005-12-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

It was designed in 1994, and I must have seen it hundreds of times, but until a friend pointed it out to me, I hadn't noticed a subliminal message in the logo of FedEx.

Do you see it?

In any case, you can learn about it here.

Land of Calamities?

2005-12-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

Allstate launched an advocacy campaign "aimed at waking Americans up to catastrophes". This drawing, used to illustrate a full page ad in the WSJ, caught my eye:

The ad is titled: What if while Katrina was pounding New Orleans, California had been hit by an earthquake?

Handshaking with Cheating Husbands

2005-11-30T09:01:00.000-08:00

David Cowan posted an interesting puzzle on his blog:

My wife and I went to a dinner party with four other couples. At the beginning of the party, some people shook hands. (Obviously, no one shook his or her own hand or spouse's hand, and no one shook hands with the same person twice.) During the party I surveyed all the other people as to how many hands each one shook. I got different answers from everyone. What did my wife say?

Scroll down to the comments section and you'll see I couldn't resist chiming in.

A colleague, who like me subscribes to Cowan's RSS feed, suggested I forward David the Cheating Husbands riddle we struggled with earlier this year. I was introduced to this puzzle in How Would You Move Mount Fuji, a book I truly enjoyed. The original puzzle (with adulterous wives rather than husbands; less appropriate for our politically correct times) was published by George Gamow and Marvin Stern back in 1958.

Rather than emailing it to David, I decided to share it with this blog's handful of faithful readers. So, here is the riddle (courtesy of Amazon and How Would You Move Mount Fuji):

For the laziest amongst you, I also posted the solution here.

Fat Neighbor on the Red Eye

2005-11-15T07:13:00.000-08:00

I'm in DC waiting for a meeting.

I got to the capital on the red eye from hell: squeezed in a middle seat between a "regular" person and this overweight traveler:

She overflowed her seat and was all over me. Shouldn't JetBlue offer me a rebate?

Tech Corner: Reclaiming 3 GB on a ThinkPad

2005-11-12T20:51:00.000-08:00

This weekend's tech project was about reclaiming unused disk space on my ThinkPad T41p.

Most ThinkPads are shipped with a hidden partition called the "Predesktop Area". This partition is over 3 GB in size and includes tools I never use and a disk image allowing a user to restore the ThinkPad to its factory state.

As I frequently backup my 60 GB disk and restoring it to its factory state is not a very appealing option, reclaiming 3 GB of disk space seemed a good idea.

The trick is to make the hidden partition visible and then merge it into the main (NTFS, Windows XP) partition without losing any data.

Unlike many of my weekend projects, this one didn't turn into a nightmare and I encountered no unforeseen complications.

If you want to do the same, here are detailed instructions:

Read the DISCLAIMER below
Download SystemRescueCD (an ISO image of about 100 MB)
Burn the downloaded image onto a blank CD (use IBM's RecordNow! or any other CD burner)
Backup your disk (don't even think of going to the next step beforehand!)
Shutdown
Turn your ThinkPad on
Before Windows XP starts, you will see "To interrupt normal startup, press the blue Access IBM button" displayed at the lower-left of the screen, press the Access IBM button
Select "Start setup utility" (double click the icon)
Go to the "Security" menu and change the status of the Predesktop area to "Disabled"
Save & Exit (F10)
Boot your ThinkPad from the CD you burned above
Hit "Enter" when you see the message "Boot:"
Enter run_qtparted when you get a command prompt
Select the (only) disk on the graphical screen
Select the (only) NTFS partition
Right click with the mouse and choose Resize
Set the new partition size (reduce the empty size to zero)
Commit your changes (File -> Commit menu)
Exit the program
Type: "shutdown now"
Turn the ThinkPad off
Remove the CD
Turn the ThinkPad on and allow it to boot WinXP
It will perform a CHKDSK -- don't worry, it's OK
When booting the first time, it will recognize disk changes and will ask to reboot -- don't worry, it's OK
Reboot
You're done: your disk has now approximately 3.4 GB of additional free space
Get a beer if you think you deserve it
Send me a thank-you email or some clever hate mail

DISCLAIMER: it worked for me, it might not work for you. You're on your own: don't blame me if you lose all your data, your disk fries, Lenovo voids your warranty or your sysadmin kills you. If you work for Goodmail Systems, ask Kevin to buy you a larger disk -- don't follow my instructions!

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

2005-11-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

This is pretty amazing, as Nicholas Carr put it, Amazon has out-googled google:

Amazon.com has out-googled Google with its creepily brilliant Mechanical Turk service, a means of embedding human beings in software code. If you're writing a program that requires a task that people can do better than computers (identifying buildings in a photograph, say), you can write a few lines of code to tap into the required human intelligence through Mechanical Turk. The request automatically gets posted on the Turk site, and people carry out the Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, for a fee set by the programmer, with Amazon taking a commission.

More details on Amazon's FAQ for their Mechanical Turk.

Non-Jewish Lesbian Poets Under Five Feet Tall

2005-10-30T19:23:00.000-08:00

Joseph Epstein reviewed The Economy of Prestige (James F. English, Harvard University Press, 409 pages, $29.95) for the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Edition.

Heeding Epstein's warning, I won't read the book:

Pity that Mr. English is an almost entirely arrhythmical writer who indites endlessly lengthy sentences in long shapeless paragraphs that make reading his book considerably less than a déjeuner sur l'herbe. If Harvard University Press gives an award for the best-written book it has published in 2005, Mr. English's probably shouldn't be in the running.

In a characteristically barbed-wire sentence, he writes: "What has transformed society since the 1970s is not the rise of a new class per se but the rise of a formidable institutional system of credentialing and consecrating which has increasingly monopolized the production and distribution of symbolic capital, especially but not exclusively of educational honors and degrees, while at the same time making the accumulation of control of such capital more and more necessary to any exercise of power." Translation: Prizes, however superfluous and foolish, can still be made to pay off for those who win them and those who award them.

But the review itself is fun to read. It crisply conveys the book's main idea:

...everyone connected with such prizes... has a more or less obvious agenda. Their point, and the larger point of Mr. English's book, is that the awarding, the judging and the accepting of prizes for cultural achievement is, at bottom, about one form or another of self-promotion.

... and is full of hilarious passages, like this:

Search hard enough and you may be able to find an award for an unpublished non-Jewish lesbian poet under five feet tall.

and this:

I have long thought that there ought to be a Nobel Prize for marriage. This would be awarded to long-suffering mates in famously difficult pairs. In the past, some of the winners might have been Countess Sophia Tolstoy, Mrs. Dostoyevsky, Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), Lionel Trilling, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, though which of the two Clintons is more deserving isn't all that easy to determine.

and that:

All this prize-giving has made the field of culture rather like one of those progressive preschools where, on graduation day, even the most hopeless child is given a prize for not actually maiming his classmates.

Here are the review's closing paragraphs:

But in the end, it doesn't matter. Winning is everything, whatever the agenda. In the economy of prestige, awards are good for publicity, for getting better jobs and for shutting up one's wary relatives. As for the prizes themselves, I was once told that if anyone tells you that you are the best at anything you do, ask that person who is the second-best. Learning who it is should take most of the air out of the accolade.

Very nice to win prizes, I'd say, so long as you understand that they don't mean anything serious about the true quality of your achievement. Take the money, wisdom suggests, and walk all the way to the bank, suppressing as best you are able the silly smile that threatens to break out at the thought that you have really gotten away with it yet again.

AOL, Yahoo!... Goodmail

2005-10-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

An exciting night: we go out of stealth mode and announce our relationship with AOL and Yahoo!

read the press release

Religion 92.0

2005-10-25T04:12:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Carr, of IT Doesn't Matter fame, ignited a debate on Schmeb 2.0 not by pointing to its bubbly aspects (like The Economist here) or to its moronic technobabble (like Joel Spolsky did here) but to its cult-like attributes. Since Carr posted The amorality of Web 2.0 on October 3rd, the priests got angry and are posting a lot...

My Kind of Chess

2005-10-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

I wonder how they match opponents in Chess Boxing...

In the black trunks, weighing 250 lbs and with an IQ of 160, Muhammad Fischer Ali...

Schadenfreude - Worst Weatherman

2005-10-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Click to watch this weatherman self-destruct on air (via Google's deal maker Chris Sacca).

Even a Chimpanzee Could Raise $100M

2005-09-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

SilconBeat blogged the following today:

We don't at all imply that Michael Moritz, partner at Silicon Valley firm Sequoia Capital, meant to target these firms, when he reportedly said the following: "I believe today even a chimpanzee could raise $100M for a venture capital fund." We're just pointing it out (see comment on this post), as a reference to how easy money is raised these capital-flush days.

Follow the link and see whose comment it was ;-)

The Search (Party) is Over and I am Stuck

2005-09-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

After reading I don't know what, I don't remember where (was it on Business 2.0?) I too was waiting for The Search, John Battelle's long anticipated book.

I pre-ordered it on Amazon and got it delivered a week ago. Little had I known that my lawyer, Mark Stevens at Fenwick & West, will be throwing a party for John and that I'll get invited.

The crowd was chic and the hors d'oeuvres exquisite but now I’m stuck with a second copy of the book!

So here’s an idea: I’ll keep the autographed copy and give away the copy I bought on Amazon to a friend. Let’s see how large my readership is: any takers?

Now We Know Who's to Blame

2005-09-03T08:20:00.001-07:00

The magnitude of the disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi is largely due to the inability of authorities to respond in a swift and effective way. The scenes we see on TV are wrenching and the inefficacy of the response maddening. But now, thanks to Bill Maher and Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider, we know who's to blame for Katrina itself -- the US government.

Yesterday night, on his HBO show Real Time, Maher invited Prof. Schneider and had him explain how global warming is the culprit for Katrina: "... we all know that hurricanes need hot air" said Maher and went on to compete with the professor on who can more explicitly blame Katrina on global warming and irresponsible policies.

Schneider, a well known global warming fundamentalist, claimed the planet's temperature rose by 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last 100 years and that as much as 50% of this rise in temperature can be attributed to mankind's deeds. So we're looking at a quarter of a degree Celsius over 100 years! With the year-over-year variance in temperature being so much larger than that, how can one blame US policies for Katrina?!

Maher was funny when he drew analogies to Bush’s “the jury is still out on evolution” nonsensical statements. But he got it in reverse. It’s Schneider’s theories that are the equivalent of “intelligent design”. I made some “research” (i.e. Googled a few keywords ;-) and it turns out my instincts were right. Prof. Schneider is indeed a snake oil peddler whose controversial tactics are well documented.

I was delighted to find the following in no other place than Schneider's own website:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. … On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. … To avert the risk (of potentially disastrous climate change) we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public imagination. That of course means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. …Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest.

--Stephen H. Schneider, author of the book Global Warming (Sierra Club), in an interview in Discover Magazine, October 1989

Enough said.

A Google Future

2005-08-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

Following a couple of recent Google announcements, the media is full of speculations about Google's world domination plans. It would have been funny if it weren't also scary!

Someone Tell the NYT About Right and Wrong

2005-08-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

Frank Rich's OpEd column in the New York Times, Someone Tell the President the War Is Over, is the Times' most emailed article in the past 24 hours and ranks third in the past 7 days.

The article's penultimate sentence really annoys me:

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there.

Which brings to mind quotes about leadership from the likes of Winston Churchill but, this being America, let's turn to another US President:

How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel? What would have happened to the Reformation if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It's right and wrong and leadership.”
-- Harry Truman, 33rd President of the United States, 1945-53

Dial-up Has Never Looked So Good!

2005-08-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

A picture that's worth a thousand words:

More pictures and extensive "product documentation" of the "Bongo Project" here.

Selling Razors, Selling Blades

2005-07-28T22:33:00.000-07:00

Interesting observation at the Daring Fireball website:

Apple has flipped the old Gillette maxim — they’re making money selling the razors (iPods), not the blades. There’s definitely a huge potential upside — big, big bucks — if the ITMS [DTD: iTune Music Store] continues growing at the current rate for a few more years. And it’s hard to imagine that anything even remotely resembling any of the current iPods will still be a high-profit-margin product 10 years from now. But at the moment, Apple’s music revenue and profits are coming from multi-hundred-dollar iPods, not 99-cent songs.

David Cowan's Accidental Philanthropy

2005-07-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

David started blogging last week. Prolific and witty, he combines insights on data security issues with personal musings about life in general.

I felt compelled to comment on his latest post Accidental Philanthropy.

This weekend I was a guest golfer at the prestigious Menlo Country Club in Woodside. It was a glorious day, with no one else in sight on this magnificently tended course (though I suspect that's because word had gotten around that a Jew was on premises).
(read David's entire post)

Here is a copy of the comment I posted on David's blog:

At 6:20 AM, Daniel Dreymann said... After the “I suspect that's because word had gotten around that a Jew was on premises” prolog, I was kind of hoping your money would go to AIPAC (much better than the ADL).

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State would have been a great choice as well (I’ll send them a check after my IPO :-) though you do fall in the trap Sharansky calls the west’s “lack of moral clarity” in his latest book The Case for Democracy: “It is why people living in free societies cannot distinguish between religious fundamentalists in democratic states and religious terrorists in fundamentalist states”.

One should also not confound bullshit and convictions. Prof. Frankfurt in On Bullshit writes about a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about "our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind." This is not about promoting religion, it’s simply bullshit. As Frankfurt writes: “The orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in the US history, What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.”

And to end this too-long-already comment: I am amazed you, as a scientist, would support The Sierra Club, master users of junk science, brainwashers of innocent 5 year old kids…

Taxing Email "for the Children"

2005-07-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

One of the email service providers I met at the Email Authentication Summit in New York, expressed strong negative feelings about the recent laws attempting to protect children from inappropriate email passed in Utah and Michigan.

Well, he is not alone...

Silverpop's CEO, Bill Nussey, wrote a good piece on this subject:

While I applaud the effort to protect children, there's a problem. These laws, designed by people who don't understand direct marketing, risk creating massive headaches for legitimate marketers. Ironically, the laws will be completely ignored by the bad emailers they seek to block. And, if other states decide to follow suit, the costs and efforts of legitimate, permission email marketing could go up, maybe a lot.

Let's look at how these laws work. While it would be easy if states just shared the "do-not-email" (DNE) list with marketers, the risk of these lists being abused by criminal spammers is just too high. Therefore, the states are requiring that marketers UPLOAD their house lists to state-run systems, which will then check the lists and send back the names that should be removed. Marketers will need to check their house lists against the states' DNE list at least every 30 days. The states will charge between $7 and $30 CPM for EACH NAME SUBMITTED for scrubbing.

This sounds simple enough. What could go wrong? A lot.

For instance, if you market automobiles to a list of 1 million names, and don't have reliable data on home state, you could be paying $120,000 per year (12 scrubs of 1MM names at $10 CPM) just to avoid breaking the laws in those states. If another 10 states adopt similar laws, email marketers could face over $1 per name per year just to scrub a tiny handful of children from their lists. At the very least, these states need a more realistic price for this service.
...
Furthermore, these laws allow for a private right-of-action. This means citizens can sue any sender they believe violated the law. The result could be that spam is no longer the most lucrative way to abuse email. All the email bad guys will move to Michigan and add their children's email to the registries. Then, they will opt-in their kids for every car, porn, beer, tobacco and gun newsletter they can find. On day 31, they'll start suing every poor marketer who hasn't been paying their hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in scrubbing fees. All of sudden, making $250,000 a year pumping out Viagra ads looks like small change to the millions in settlements you can collect from the legitimate marketers of disallowed products.

The economics are indeed interesting. Ed Felten at Princeton sees it simply as a tax - Michigan Email Registry as a Tax on Bulk Emailers:

The main effect of the fee is to turn the whole program into a tax on bulk emailing. The tax operates even if only a few kids’ addresses are registered, so parents worried about leaking their kids’ addresses can safely decline to register them. So let’s look at this as a tax scheme rather than a child protection program.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It's Not About the Haves and Have-Nots

2005-07-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

Do the youngsters on top of this plain minivan look like they are showing off their wealth?

Yet, this is exactly the picture the New York Times chose to illustrate journalist Sarah Boxer's dumb thesis on the We're Not Afraid website:

But more and more, there's a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure. Yesterday there were lots of pictures posted of smiling families at the beach and of people showing off their cars and vans. A picture from Italy shows a white sports car and comes with the caption: "Afraid? Why should we be afraid?" ... We're Not Afraid, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they're not afraid of the have-nots.

This is not a war between the West's "haves" and the "have-nots" of Africa and Latin America. This is a war between Freedom and those who hate it. I'd recommend Boxer read The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror by Natan Sharansky.

Blue is Cold, Red is Hot

2005-07-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

Isn't it amusing that "cool" and "hot" are both positive adjectives for something trendy or fashionable? You can use the words in their most literal sense here:

Look at Inhabitat.com or MoCo Loco for more pictures.

Hansacanyon's temperature sensitive backlighting uses LEDs that change color as a function of water temperature so you can see when it's hot or cold.

Don't Run, it's a Bomb!

2005-07-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

Edward Kaplan of the Yale University School of Management, and Moshe Kress of the Naval Postgraduate School reached counterintuative conclusions in a new study about suicide bombers as reported by the Wall Street Journal (free):

If, for example, a suicide bomber walked into a crowded plaza, "standoff" bomb detectors might well pick up an unambiguous signal. A terahertz imaging system could spy the telltale wires and explosives in 30 milliseconds, and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy now in development could sniff out the trace vapors emitted by the ethylene glycol dinitrate in the plastique. Let's say the sensors alerted a security guard, who spotted the terrorist and yelled to the crowd, "Run, it's a bomb!"

In this scenario, the explosives-detection technology worked perfectly. An alarm sounded before a detonation. People were able to run or throw themselves to the ground. But when the bomber exploded, the casualty toll might not have been any less than if the sensors weren't deployed. Even worse, in some situations the intervention -- "Run!" or "Get down!" -- could lead to more casualties
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A large, dense crowd puts more people in harm's way, but "the probability of being exposed to a bomb fragment declines exponentially with the size of the crowd." As a crowd flees, there are fewer people near the bomber to absorb the fragments (as when a soldier falls on a grenade) and more people, unshielded, farther away. Simple geometry shows that you can hit more people at a radius 20 feet from a bomber than you can five feet from him.

"If the first ring of unshielded people is at a greater radius, there are more of them, and more will be hit," says Prof. Kaplan.

The same effect occurs if people throw themselves to the ground. That minimizes each person's exposed area, but also at the expense of decreasing human shielding. For bombs with 500 or more fragments (in Israel, 1,000 is typical), "hit the deck" can raise rather than cut casualties. If scores of people fall from an average height of five feet eight inches to 1.5 feet, the scientists calculate, casualties could rise as high as 50 from 37.

Kaplan and Kress published their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Do We Really Need Porn in 3-D?

2005-07-03T19:24:00.000-07:00

That's the question the New York Times asks and seems to answer positively:

Do we really need porn in 3-D? Will "Casablanca" be a better film when we can reach out and touch Ingrid Bergman? Will sitcoms be funnier and dramas more engrossing when writers create stories that move not only up/down and right/left but also in/out?

Forget my provocative title, read Michael Krantz' Television That Leaps Off the Screen, cool technology!

Phone MMS Blogging

2005-06-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

One more test...

Update (using my PC): the above picture, caption and title were sent from my Treo 650 as an MMS message. This uses Blogger's new Blogger Mobile service. Cool, isn't it?

A Dye Job is Cheaper

2005-06-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

One of the books I'm currently reading is Freakonomics by Steven Levitt with Stephen Dubner (I always read a couple of books in parallel, it's more confusing hence more fun). I have seen Levitt on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and I'm not really surprised by anything in the book, still it is indeed very entertaining.

Here's an example (page 83):

In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree--and, with a $100 dye job versus a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.

No More Middlebrow Culture

2005-06-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

David Brooks, The NY Times OpEd's token conservative, writes today about middlebrow culture in the late 1950's and early 1960's:

... an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one...

Brooks claims that middlebrow culture received mortal blows that came from opposite directions:

Intellectuals objected to the earnest and optimistic middle-class arrivistes who were tromping over everything and dumbing down their turf... Readers felt less of a need to go outside themselves to absorb works of art as a means of self-improvement... Less Rembrandt, more Me. Fewer theologians, more dietitians.

Ashkenazic Mutation?!

2005-06-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a feel-good paragraph from an otherwise controversial, non-PC, and quite depressing New York Times article titled Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions.
They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

Update (6/27): Permanent link to the NYT article

The More Men, the More Chickens

2005-05-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

Betting on the Planet, this 1990 classic by John Tierny, is still freely available on the New York Times website.

This idea marked the crucial difference between Simon and Ehrlich, and between economists and ecologists: the view of the world not as an closed ecosystem but as an flexible marketplace. The concept of carrying capacity might make sense in discussing Ehrlich's butterflies or Vogt's "Gadarene swine," but Simon rejected animal analogies. He liked to quote the 19th-century economist Henry George: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens."

At First Flush

2005-05-28T02:46:00.000-07:00

Refreshing non-PC editorial in Investor's Business Daily:

Quran: So Islam's holy book was mishandled after all. Seems that some guards touched a few of them, another placed a pair on a TV and an interrogator stood over one during the questioning of a detainee. The horror.
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Overreaction and hysteria, though, are hallmarks of radical Islam. (They're also hallmarks of the mainstream media when they smell a chance to cast President Bush in a poor light.)

Baptists haven't rioted when a Bible's been abused. The Episcopal Church hasn't gone on a deadly rampage because Scripture was profaned. Not a single Jew has run amok after a Torah was trashed. The Catholic clergy hasn't stirred mob violence when sacred items of its faith have been trod under foot.

But according to the extreme code that roused some Muslims to riot over accusations that a U.S. soldier had flushed a Quran down a toilet, they'd be justified in doing so.

There are enough examples of Jewish and Christian holy books, sites and images being defiled by Muslims — and by so-called artists — to give plenty of offense. But the media don't seem to care about them.

Highbrow

2005-05-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.
-- Brander Matthew (1852–1929)

A Passover Surprise

2005-04-24T19:59:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I usually don't blog personal stuff. All my posts (try very hard and probably often fail to) make a point with potential value to strangers who share my interests. This one is different. I couldn't resist.

========================================

Not Elijah, but still...

We're about to sit for the Seder at a friend's house in Menlo Park, California. Martin, our host, is the ex-CEO of Alza - a fascinating and ultra charismatic mench. The last guests arrive, a family of four. I immediately recognize the father: Nissan! my classmate at high school in Israel. He was one of my best friends and my partner for all school projects. After high school, our ways parted; we hadn't met in 21 years!

He hadn't known I was invited, I didn't even know he was living in the USA, our host hadn't figured we might know each other.

Turns out he now works at Google in Mountain View, a short distance from my own office.

So weird.

Safire Kisses Our Privacy Goodbye

2005-04-14T21:34:00.000-07:00

If you care about privacy, security, or computers -- go and read this article.

If you care about privacy, security, and computers -- run and read this article.

Here's a short excerpt:

These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. ''Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,'' O'Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, ''they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.''

Click here to read the whole piece.

Does Google Feel TOO Lucky"?

2005-04-02T17:56:00.000-08:00

Sting opened his USA tour in San Jose yesterday. We bought tickets months ago.

The SJSU Event Center is at: 209 South 7th Street, San Jose.

Type that in Google Maps and you get: 209 NORTH(!!!) 7th Street, San Jose.

I hadn't noticed the subtle change. I drove according to the directions (even entered the address off the printout into my vehicle's navigation system). No event center at 209 North... only slums :-(

Now type another street (e.g. 209 South 17th) or another number (e.g. 309 South 7th) and you get an OK address. My guess is that Google Maps believes there's no 209 S 7th and tries to be helpful by attempting to guess what I really meant. The alternative address should have been suggested ("Do you mean... ?") rather than automatically plugged in.

PS: Yahoo! Maps finds the place just right. MSN Maps and Street&Trips don't believe a 209 South 7th exist so they show the street (not at a specific number on the street).

Sometimes it's better not to feel too lucky.

There's a happy end: with a friend's help we eventually found the place in time!

Update (May '05):
Nissan is right (see comments below). Google did solve the bug, they now use a "did you mean..." approach.

Detroit or Hong Kong?

2005-03-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

The provocative headline of this NYT piece, Is Silicon Valley Similar to Detroit?, is unfortunately followed by a meatless article. A much better discussion can be found on VentureBlog in a November 2003 entry.

She Sang it in Broken English

2005-03-27T09:57:00.000-08:00

Electrifying performance by Marianne Faithfull at The Fillmore yesterday. She sang many of her old hits and several gems from her last two albums. It was the fourth time I saw her performing and this was by far the best. If she comes to a town near you, don't miss her!

Be Patient and Achieve All Things

2005-03-25T06:16:00.000-08:00

A friend sent me a funny email: "The Principles of Jewish Buddhism".
Best quote:

Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

No need to reproduce the entire set of principles here as they can be found on dozens of sites.

Special License Plates for Stolen Cars

2005-02-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

Unbelievable... but true! The Palestinian authority issues special license plates for cars known to be stolen from Israel. There are even variants for stolen cars used as taxis or... for official governmental use! Don't believe me? Listen to this story on NPR.

OK, now that you believe me, here are some details beyond what you have heard on NPR.

For years, Israeli-Arabs were stealing cars in Israel and driving them to Palestinian relatives in the West Bank or Gaza. Within hours, a car was fully dismantled into its components. Later, the components were resold to unscrupulous Israeli mechanics seeking low cost spare parts.

Then, in the nineties, the Oslo process changed the rules of the game: once a stolen car was driven into Palestinian Authority-controlled territory, the thieves were home safe - beyond the reach of Israeli Police. The Palestinian Authority did nothing but encourage the practice. Gone was the need to act quickly and take the car apart. A much more lucrative market of drivable stolen cars emerged. At its peak, the phenomenon was huge: 15% of all new cars sold in Israel were purchased as replacements for stolen cars!

And then Arafat initiated the second Intifada. That was bad news for everybody – including for car thieves; Israel had to erect new road blocks and regain control of virtually all of the West Bank. Smuggling cars out of Israel became much more difficult and freely driving a stolen car became something confined to the Gaza strip.

And you thought that issuing driving licenses to illegal aliens was an original California idea?!

Enigma

2005-02-16T20:28:00.000-08:00

A colleague and I visited the RSA Conference in San Francisco today. A couple of booths had Enigma machines on display: the one assigned to the NSA (No Such Agency) and the booth of a firm I work with and value very highly - Cryptography Research.

Here's a picture of me with one of the Enigmas:

Breaking the Nazi Enigma was one of World War II's most important developments. For a history of cryptography, including a chapter on Enigma, get a copy of The Code Book by Simon Singh. Don't confuse it with another book by Singh, Fermat's Enigma - it has nothing to do with this Enigma.

Useful Advice

2005-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

Here I am quoting again from blogs I like. This time from Joel Spolsky's blog, with a graph from a Katie Lucas essay on ostentatious computing methodologies:

How to win a race:

Step 1: write about running really fast
Step 2: go and draw a plan of the racetrack
Step 3: go and buy really tight lycra shorts
Step 4: run really, really, really fast
Step 5: cross line first

Barriers to Entry

2005-02-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

Funny new entry on Bruce Schneier's blog:

As this photo shows, it doesn't matter what kind of security you implement if it's easy to get around.