I went around and around the house looking for my phone, searching the usual places again and again, and finally got down on my hands and knees with a flashlight next to the bed and discovered the black phone had fallen off the nightstand and into a black shoe.
Ryan O’Neill: Let me repeat that back to you.
One of the most effective communications strategies I use is repeating back, in my own words, what was just explained to me.
I do this sometimes when doing interviews, but I find the people I’m interviewing will interrupt me to make the point themselves, or elaborate on whatever point I’m repeating back.
The Hyperloop was always a scam.
The tech industry’s move into transportation was not only a failure; it was an active campaign to deny the public access to better transit and trains because the billionaires of Silicon Valley don’t personally want to get around that way. The Hyperloop was one part of that, but so were the Boring Company, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars. The Hyperloop’s failure provides a lesson we’re learning far too late: that Silicon Valley won’t deliver us a better world if they can’t find some way to profit off it.
What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President. Historian Jill Lepore: After the Civil War, attempts to prosecute Jefferson Davis bogged down in politics, racism and legal pettifogging and went nowhere.
These kinds of lists are catnip for me.
Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
I encounter the Focusing Effect regularly. I live in San Diego and do business with people from all over the world. I think they think my life is just surfing and campfire parties on the beach with Gidget.
I saw this sign on the ground next to an impressively large poop.
It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google.
Journalist JS Tan, writing at The Baffler, argues that Google has become a cesspool of bullshit jobs—engineers rewarded for building projects that are never deployed, or deployed and quickly abandoned, and bloated middle management. The company is trying to change its culture.
I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s observation that Google only ever built 1-1/2 products—search and I forget what else. It bought its ad business, which was like Jed Clampett luckily striking oil in his backyard. Google also bought other businesses that have been successful for it: YouTube, Google Maps, and Waze. (Maybe Gmail is the half-business of which Cory speaks?—Google did develop that.)
Google’s spectacular failures with Google Glass, Google+ and Google Reader, to name just three examples, suggest a company whose innovative powers are far more hype than reality. On the other hand, it’s no mean feat for Google to build and maintain its vast, global infrastructure of data centers and subsea cables, and keep its businesses—acquired or otherwise—successful.
Ars Technica rates 20 time travel movies by entertainment and scientific plausibility.
What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up thusly: You can travel to the future, but you probably can’t travel to the past, although to be honest, we’re not really sure.
Their list includes a personal favorite of mine: “Time After Time” (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell as time-traveling H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his plucky feminist 1970s galpal and David Warner as Jack the Ripper.
The IMDB trivia page for “Time After Time” does not disappoint.
All four of the real H.G. Wells’ children were still alive at the time of this film’s release.
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Malcolm McDowell listened to recordings of H.G. Wells to prepare for the role. According to him, Wells’ voice was high-pitched and Cockney-accented, so he decided not to imitate
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The movie’s title inspired Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time After Time”, when in 1983 she browsed through a copy of TV Guide for “imaginary song titles”.
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A deleted scene featured Wells meeting a punk who was playing extremely loud boom-box music on a bus in San Francisco. [Director] Nicholas Meyer later reused this idea in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
Much of the action of “Time After Time” takes place in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, as do a few scenes in Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety.” I stayed in the same hotel in 2017; it hadn’t changed much, other than becoming deliciously dark and gloomy. A monument to 70s futurism.
One quibble with the Ars Technica list. Authors Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll rightly praise the first Christoper Reeve “Superman,” including Gene Hackman’s “marvelous selection of outrageous wigs,” but add:
We’re knocking off a point for the cheesy “Read My Mind” spoken song as Superman takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic flight over Metropolis, which has aged poorly.
No, that scene did not “age poorly.” It was always terrible. It was cringe in 1978 and it is cringe today.
Now I want to see “Superman” again, to enjoy Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine hamming it up as villains.