February 2012
1 post
My Networking Meetings
Earlier this week, I had the most amazing networking meeting with a French woman. (I would shamelessly namedrop but I hate that, unless she wants the publicity.)
I am looking for work, and so this meeting was set up by a mutual friend who thought she might be able to help me: the woman he wanted me to meet is one of a handful high-powered business women in Silicon Valley.
“And,”...
January 2012
3 posts
“So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the...”
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“[b]asic melancholy; sullen glooms and black studies; atrocious temper;...”
– The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas
"Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which... →
December 2011
4 posts
“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there’s anything God-like about...”
– Henry Miller
Grit →
“O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the...”
– The Odyssey, T.E. Lawrence translation
September 2011
1 post
“I tell Raj, you think I’m not helping the poor in India. Go take a look at...”
– Lightning People
August 2011
6 posts
Old art! Oh sketches for paintings done digitally when that seemed innovative! Oh girl I was in college! Oh girl I still am today! Oh the 90’s, the Panopticon, Foucault, and the Dostoevsky scholar I lived with in Cambridge!
“So I shall attempt, contrary to my normal method, to write a story with a...”
– Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
July 2011
2 posts
May 2011
3 posts
http://haw-lin.com →
March 2011
1 post
There are, I think, two Americas. There is that which we decry on reading the newspapers. “Those fools,” we say, of the group not of our political bent, “how in the world can they believe the nonsense they are spouting? How can intelligent people act that way?” This is the America of “them.”
And then there is the America we participate in — that fairly...
February 2011
1 post
“He worries, he worries about his mustache, his old navy raincoat, his weight,...”
– from The Journals of John Cheever
December 2010
1 post
The trend toward ever-higher official conduct norms was best discussed in the 1964 essay, “The Purity Potlach”, by Bayless Manning, the Dean of Stanford Law School:
To the extent that our politics partake of the nature of a Morality Play, they have inevitably required, an generated, a set of theatrical conventions as arbitrary, and as acceptable, as thonse of any dramatic form. The...
November 2010
1 post
Not Important
In Hemingway’s short story, Indian Camp, a doctor takes his son along to witness him perform a difficult emergency labor. During the labor his son asks, “Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” The father’s reply is one of my favorite sentences in the English language.
“No. I haven’t any anaesthetic,” his father said....
June 2010
3 posts
Chinese Dream Up a High-Speed Train that Never... →
“Most people agree that today’s FDA would not have approved aspirin; even...”
– No Refills, The Atlantic
December 2008
4 posts
Best Date Movie Ever.
Revolutionary Road
(It’s good to be reminded of the quiet desperation of marriage on the first date.)
On Love Stories
Just saw Slumdog Millionaire, a fantastic story about a boy in the slums of India overcoming the most adverse circumstances, but, of course, it was all wrapped up in a Hollywood bow of love story. She, in the end, is why he does everything: why he endures.
Perhaps romantic love really is the most important thing in the world. It’s the one gesture of choice you have, the one conscious...
Best. Christmas. Ever.
A Christmas miracle happened today! I was starting to get anxious since I hadn’t started my Christmas shopping yet. (It was only yesterday I realized I wasn’t actually going to knit everyone sweaters like I’d been planning.) Then, I heard about this e-commerce site on NPR. It is one-stop-shopping with the perfect Christmas present for everyone, such as, “a malaria net for a...
"The secret of all victory lies in the... →
October 2008
1 post
“I see a changing landscape in which the emphasis is less on the sex than it is...”
– Well - More People Appear to Be Cheating on Their Spouses, Studies Find - NYTimes.com
September 2008
1 post
“The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers...”
– Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
July 2008
1 post
Steve Schmidt - the guy who’s running John McCain’s campaign - is like Karl Rove’s son.
Schmidt is probably one of the best targeter of voters in the country. He really knows how to connect one-on-one with voters.
He doesn’t just do polling like other consultants - he uses commercial market studies.
He reduces voting to who shops at Wal-Mart, Target and Costco and how to...
April 2008
4 posts
“Wal-Mart pays some of its employees such a low wage that they must subsist on a...”
– Democratic Staff of House Comm. on Education and the Workforce (report by Rep. George Miller), Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We Pay for Wal-Mart, 8 (Feb. 16, 2004).
“Roughly two-thirds of new oil demand is coming from countries that have...”
– Christopher Ruppel, a senior geopolitical analyst with the consulting firm John S. Herold. in Where gasoline is cheap, and why it is making yours pricey - May. 4, 2007
“It is all about interestingness, and algorithmic detection of interestingness...”
– Paul Kedrosky: Productivity Note: Three Tools, and a Funeral
March 2008
14 posts
What Microloans Miss: Financial Page: The New... →
PowerPoint presentation about using principles of... →
On Professional Blogging
I dislike having a blog, particularly a professional one. It doesn’t seem a professionally wise move: you are bound to write something idiotic on them. However, while perhaps not wise, blogs are much too useful to ignore. So useful that I now consider it a professional responsibility to have one, and want everyone I work with to have one too. I find them to be the single most useful tool in...
(Notes from Legal Futures, Hal Varian)
The Kaplan program @ Santa Fe Institute. Everyone else wanted to prove their theory was correct, but he really needed the 10,000 prize. He let everyone else do the price discovery, then he snatched all the trades. An index fund — you’re letting markets decide on the price then you’re buying at the market. Soon, everyone else was doing...
Self and its corollary as currency. Rise of the printing press prioritized the vernacular. Photography and its effects on war and photography. Africa — phone minutes as currency. HP a net jewel (energy) expenditure. Our conception of ourselves, our time, and the amount we touch other people.
New kinds of groups to share rewards and risks. Opening bank accounts, getting insurance, having...
shbrown: At Legal Futures listening to Kramer talk... →
Eben Moglen asking Kevin Martin about whether the FCC is going to require disclosure requirement for network management practices? He says yes, that this is going to be critical for whether the FCC determines whether this is an effective management practice. He says the complaint process gives them the opportunity to address this, and agrees that it would be helpful in being able to fully...
“Make visible, simple unifying metrics visible to the entire company.”
“Beware multiple simultaneous essential innovations. BART made this mistake: cars...”
“The 20th century was about sorting out supply. The 21st is going to be about...”
– This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize
“[A]s I’ve emphasized in three other postings, if you choose a good...”
– fluidinfo
“Data Property Rights, Not Portability”
– from GigaOm