2012′s Best Articles (Business, Politics, Education)

1 Business

1. Entrepreneurs are the New Labor by Venkatesh Rao – sharp economic analysis of the startup incubators, Rao’s best article.

2. A strategy to save Netflix (May 2012). Has it been successful? I haven’t followed up on this.

3. Inside McKinsey - oft apologetic article for McKinsey in wake of Rajat Gupta crisis. But interesting flavour.

4. May 2012′s Facebook Fallacy by Michael Wolff. With benefit of hindsight, it appears FB shedding ad-model has led them to developing a smartphone (unconfirmed rumor) and the Social Graph Search (promising)

5. The History of Management Consulting - Jill Lepore. Details how modern management consulting (excl. McKinsey and Arthur D. Little) came about with Frederick Taylor, ‘conceived in sin’ because Taylor was a bit of a figure-fudging fraud. Chris McKenna’s history of mgmt consulting starts with Arthur D Little, Walter Kiechel history of strategy consulting starts with BCG’s founding, and this article starts with F.W. Taylor. My sense is that there isn’t a consensus when consulting began.

6. Peter Thiel’s CS183 Lectures. Self-recommending, the most useful thing I learnt was HOW he thought – in 2×2 matrices. A series I will revisit.

2 Politics and Economics

1. Race, IQ, and Wealth by Ron Unz – Detailed statistic study of puzzles in IQ. Convinced me that IQ was something very malleable. Does not seem strongly genetic. Of especial interest: “Super Flynn effect” – and “these rapid rises in IQ due to changes in the general socio-economic environment appear completely absent when we examine the international or domestic IQ data for East Asian populations, for whom even tenfold differences in real per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact on IQ.”

2. Three Axes Model by Arnold Kling – libertarians are on the statist axis, liberals on oppression axis, conservatives on the barbarism axis.

(b) Comes from same line of thinking as: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/april/the-tribal-mind-moral-reasoning-and-public-discourse

3. How Much Tech Can One City Take? The perils of allowing tech to drive out essential services and dominate the ecosystem of a city

4. The growing class of working poor in Singapore – all 3 parts are worth reading. Very sharp insights – “Singaporean curriculum too hard, causing real education cost (incl tuition) to spike”; “government operates on a a depressed wage system” – uncharitably, slave labour

5. The Onion on Mitt Romney.

6. The Macroeconomics of Chinese Kleptocracy – John Hempton. Thesis: Chinese savers forced to save at state banks, which give inflation-adjusted negative returns. Looting ensues.

(b) Hooha and discussion on the article when Krugman spotlights it: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/financial-repression-chinese-style/

(c) Another hilarious article by Hempton: http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/trust-me-i-run-pyramid-marketing-scheme.html

7. Paired Article: Wen Jiabao’s Fortune. In a similar article I read on Forbes or Businessweek, I was struck by an anecdote. A Chinese envoy to Washington wanted to get a special visa for his son during 1989′s Tiananmen. The embassy staff revolted.

8. Battle for the Cato Institute

3 Education

1. The Myth of American Meritocracy by Ron Unz- controversial piece about Asian/Asian American exclusion, and declining Jewish performance at the Ivies. Ends with a proposal to use random lottery. Explains the credentialling inflation among the particular subset of Asian Americans.

2. Downward Mobility haunts US education – good primer on a pessimistic truth. It haunts many enrolled in university.

3. New Yorker report on nootropics

4. To the class of 2012:

4 Others

1. The Millions, deconstructing detective novels one trope at a time. Also, see TVtropes.

2. The World’s Largest Diamond Heist

Assorted Links 20/01/2013

1. A new Chinese food scandal. – “Gutter Oil”. Lack of safety regulation?
2. In tribute to Araucaria, crossword setter extraordinaire – I admired him from afar, not being able to solve his cryptics. I had no idea he was 90. Sadly, his advanced age makes it unlikely he will be around much longer.
3. Planetes. I was recommended this manga on space debris collection by Jason during our stay in Marseille. So far it has the Cowboy Bebop, old Western feel.
4.  Rotten Tomatoes Best Documentaries. I am a believer in the power of the law of large numbers. The larger the numbers, the more accurate. Lacking an IMDBpro account, I make do with this list. Related: Searching for Sugarman (2012) is a great documentary.
5. Dead Sea Scroll controversy.
6. Review of “Far From the Tree“. It will be in my to read pile.
7. Wikipedia article on Koi fish. A lot of the pedigree rules make sense once you realise they had ponds (top-down) and not aquariums (face-forward).
8. Some pets are surprisingly long-lived. The chimpanzee age of 70+ struck me as an especially long tail in the age distribution.
9. Also, Heathrow doesn’t seem to have free wi-fi.

Notes from Weimar

1. Weimar is a very small city. Most of the historic area can be walked within 500 metres. All UNESCO protected.
2. The Bauhaus museum is very worth seeing. It is sad to note that this Weimar-native movement died in 1933 in Berlin.
3. The Bauhaus was a pluralistic movement in goals. Walter Gropius and Johannes Itten clashed during the early years of Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was first founded to unify art and craftsmanship, but Walter Gropius later saw that mass production would mean the greatest utility of Bauhaus designs would come from prototypes. Johannes Itten disagreed , and left Bauhaus in 1923.
4. 50% of Bauhaus accepted students were women (unprecedentedly high for the time).
5. The grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar during the period of Weimar classicism doesn’t seem extravagantly rich. Anna Amalia was the mother of Duke (from 1815 Grand Duke) Carl August of Weimar. And yet, Anna Amalia’s Wittumspalais, Widow’s Palace) –  the “marble” reception area on the 3rd floor, arguably the heart of a house for a saloneer like her, is actually made of faux-marble. It’s wood painted with marble patterns.
6. Anna Amalia, aristocratic cultural patron, also had a library, which is #1 on Tripadvisor. The seeming-goldleaf decoration of the main library is again, painted designs on wood. This speaks to a tasteful, if enforced, economy.
7. Goethe’s theory of colours, while little studied today, seems to have the salutary effect of good interior design. His private study is made painted green because he thought that would be a soothing colour, conducive to thought.
8. Goethe got up at 4am and that caused consternation for his servants. Schiller slept at 4am.
9. In Goethe’s private study, there are no man-made artworks, only his collection of stones. He thought man-made artworks would overstimulate the mind. In contrast, his public areas had over 26,000 historical items, his house was very much a museum. There’d be no thinking in this room – just simple objects and tasteful furniture.
10. Reproductions abound in the Goethe house. Lots of plaster casts
11. He would use pencils instead of pens for fluent and uninterrupted writing.
12. Goethe had a cushion for his arm to rest on, wehn he read for long periods of time.
13. Goethe arranged the historical items in chronological order for different geographical areas, so he could pick up on developments in each different school.
14. Goethe’s reception room is yellow in colour, because he thought that would make people open up. “Yellow warm, green aids the thoughts and refreshes”
15. Goethe wanted to have his house be full of conviviality – there’d be card areas, conversational areas, numerous large and closed rooms. People could bring friends. But it was only half successful, because Goethe always wanted to steer the discussion to certain topics. This points to one of Goethe’s (few) weaknesses – his domineering egoism. It very much crushed his son August, who could not escape the Universal Man’s shadow. (For Singaporeans, one might draw a cheeky comparison to Lee Hsien Loong and his father)
16. The Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar, originally put there by Elisabeth Niedemeyer (nee Nietzsche, his sister) is open only from April to October.
17. Thuringien food isn’t that great. Meat in sauce.
18. Weimar is snowy, and with 65,000 people is my ideal of a culturally literate town.
19. Few people in Weimar speak a lot of English. The older generation tends to not speak much English. Thus, there’s still some conversational incentive to learn German (for the business types). For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the argument goes that one should learn languages that open up communications to people you couldn’t communicate with before. It’s featured in this blog post by one of my favorite Singaporean bloggers.

Put down of the day

“Don’t be nasty. We don’t need to hear about your programming penis.”

Theory of Fruits

When I am gone, the tower in my intellectual edifice shall be the theory of fruits:

Stated simply, we may assign each fruit a Fruit Difficulty Score, which corresponds in inverse proportion to our frequency of eating such a fruit.

Fruit Difficulty Score = (No. of Instruments Required to Prepare, Eat Fruit) + (Juice Gets on Hand? {Boolean score, 0 or 1})

1. Mandarin Orange = 0. Peel with hands, no juice on hands
2. Banana = 0.
3. Apple (eaten directly) = 1. Juice on hand.
4. Plum (eaten directly) = 1. Juice on hand.
5. Apple (Sliced) = 2. Knife/Corer + Fork/Juice on hand
6. Durian = 2. Big knife + durian pulp on hand.

We may thus class fruits into 3 equivalence classes. This is a handy rule-of-thumb if we don’t want to measure the time taken to prepare and eat fruits and wash-up afterwards, with a stopwatch.

 

Book review: Moby Dick

Moby Dick lies on the unread shelves of many a reader.

I can assert a few facts about the book:

1. The beginning of the book flags.
2. The middle part of the book is fascinating, with all manner of description about the enterprise of whaling. Melville’s best sentences come between parts 30%-70% of the book.
3. The language is charged with religious utterance and dense, colourful prose. Representative: “The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.” The interesting question is whether Melville achieves any novel effect from this rare ability: I think he does – Moby Dick inhabits a world of larger-than-life, myth-ical sentences. It provides us with the scientific-observational mythology of a modern profession – functionally it may be said to (1) legitimise and (2) dignify a previously unknown profession. ”This investiture alone WILL adequately protect…” Sufficient, is the synthesis of observational detail and religious language, to form the Bible of a profession, and invest in its adherents a sense of higher calling.
4. The part leading up to the battle is boring.
5. The battle is short, and brutal.

This is a novel of uncommon power. It is sad Melville did not write another novel after this. Melville’s canonising effects are achieved by religious language, but I find it hard to see how this extends to professions that do not encounter life-and-death scenarios with nature, at least without irony and self-satire. One of the last adventure novels.

The 3 questions I’d like to discuss, or leave you with:

1. What exactly is special about Moby Dick?
2. For part (1), how does Melville achieve his effects?
3. What is Melville trying to say about the human condition?

Assorted Links 13/01/2013

1. Japan’s Gun Control Laws. – “Under current laws, if a low-level yakuza is caught with a gun and bullets that match, he’ll be charged with aggravated possession of firearms and will then face an average seven-year prison term. Simply firing a gun carries a penalty of three years to life. And for the “accomplice” reasons above, a yakuza boss may decide a death sentence is more appropriate if his thug miraculously gets released on bail before going to jail.” *************** “However, the focus is not only on ensuring gun owners don’t misuse their weapons, but also on getting rid of what the police call nemuri-ju (sleeping guns). ”There are not many hunters left now and many people get too old to use their weapons. If they can’t fire them properly, they get taken away. The fewer guns that are out there, the safer Japan is. That’s how we look at it,” Detective X explained.” ****************”In 2002, there were 158 shootings in Japan and 24 deaths. Last year there were 45 shootings and eight deaths — and of the 45 shootings, 33 were yakuza-related.” (72% decrease)
2. Gorilla control.
3. Aaron Swartz.
4. Akibaranger episode 1. One of the best comedy series I have ever seen. Final villain and series progression is a hoot. Now renewed for a second season!
5. Markets for love, Japan. Enlightened. Should spread beyond Japan.
6. The Gastronomic Philosopher. “The physiology of taste” is a stimulating work. Choice quote: Charles Townsend Copeland as saying “To eat is human, to digest divine”. 
7. Brooks on Jared Diamond. I’m thumbing my way through the new book but it’s a bit dry.

As always, I have a food blog here.