14 August 08
Black Swans
Nassim Taleb’s theory of the black swan has now entered my list of major planning principles, after having just read his book by the same name. A black swan is an event that is a) completely out-of-the-blue unexpected b) has an extreme impact and c) is something that we tend to concoct all sorts of explanations for after the fact. 9/11 is a classic example of a black swan, as is the success of Harry Potter. (The term “a black swan” in ancient times was used to refer to an impossibility, since all swans were known to be white. This conception had to be revised when Europeans got to Australia in the 17th century, and discovered actual black swans.) Taleb’s thesis is that black swans play far more of a role in history, whether at an individual or a grand scale, than we are accustomed to think about.
A paradox of black swan theory is how does one carry out planning in a world dominated by black swans, since they are by definition completely unpredictable. Taleb’s field is finance, and he is quite critical of the traditional concept of financial risk, the theory of which is centered around bell curve-shaped probability distributions, rather than extreme events. But examples are to be found everywhere. Just because people hold the professional title of being planners doesn’t mean that they aren’t wont to focus on business-as-usual. How many land use and transportation planners have thought about peak oil? And have run the scenario of $8 plus per gallon of gas through their transportation models? A lot of cars will be off the road then, as driving trends in the past year suggest.
11 August 08
How to Cover the Olympics on Television
Yesterday as we congregated at 7 am for our birding outing the mother of one of our younger participants said, bleary-eyed, how hard it was for her to get up because she was hooked on the Olympics. “But it would go much faster if they cut out the advertising,” she said in her sleepy Kiwi accent.
Well, yes, it would. Numenius and I don’t have a TV and regularly deplore American coverage of, say, soccer events where the actual match is interrupted for ads. I don’t think this happens as much as it used to but it’s irritating to the point of madness and we watch Univisión, in Spanish, for soccer, at one of the local Mexican restaurants. (I notice ESPN has at least hired British commentators for soccer, who discuss the match and not which high school the striker’s grandmother attended, a clear improvement.)
Our dinner at Fuzio’s last night was outdoors, but the TV was on inside and featured nonstop non-coverage of the Olympics. This is more or less how it goes:
a) Only ever show events in which Americans are predicted to win a medal. (You don’t want to embarrass those predicted to do less well by showing their failure on primetime. The thought that people might be interested in the sport inherently—gasp—never occurs to the programmers, apparently.)
b) Only ever show the performances of these predicted American medal winners and at most their two closest rivals (you want to be “fair and balanced,” after all). The exception to this is when more than one American is predicted to win a medal, in which case you show their “interaction,” taking pains to elaborate on their team spirit or their rivalry, depending.
c) Only ever allow 15 seconds out of every 15 minutes to show an actual “event” (well, the tiny piece of it featuring the performances as outlined in [b], above). The remainder of the 15-minute chunk is broken down as follows:
- Advertising.
- Fancy Olympics swirling golden graphics that wrap around before and after anything else, such as advertising.
- A talking head, either in the studio (male, in a somber suit) surrounded by golden swirling graphics, or in the sweltering Beijing smog (female, in a pretty printed suit), giving their no doubt finest insights into the event that has just been or is just about to be shown for 15 seconds.
- The sob story. The athlete, the athlete’s grandmother’s corns that prevented her from getting gold in 1948, the fact that the athlete was dropped on the head as a small child. The sob story can last way beyond 15 seconds: some last even 5 minutes, an apparent lifetime in TV. The sob story can be repeated many times over the course of a day’s Olympic “coverage.” It is of far greater importance than the event itself, even when the gold medal is won by an American, who is then shown welling up as the stars and stripes are raised (with the voiceover repeating the sob story). (The sob story can be extended to any athlete of any nationality who doesn’t win his or her event and can be captured on camera crying, whether or not they had a difficult childhood. Since most athletes don’t, in fact, win, the number of sob stories available increases exponentially over the course of two weeks, leading to a scheduling crisis and the emergency hiring of a sob-story über-editor who overdoses on pizza and Red Bull and who needs, and gets, some quiet time at the end of August.)
- The raising of the aforementioned stars and stripes.
- More advertising, bracketed by golden swirling graphics. The advertising can and frequently does pick up on a sob story or on a pseudo-sob-story, the raising of the stars and stripes, and the teared-up athlete on the podium. (It never focuses on the losing kind of sob story, however.)
- Irrelevant local color, such as footage of the Great Wall, zooming in on white people buying, you guessed it, Coca Cola: see, they’re capitalists like us really.
I am at an absolute loss to see how people who are avid Olympics followers—and it seems there are a lot of them—can keep their sanity or even their dinner when pelted with this insulting cack. Even more mystifying is how the athletes themselves can tolerate the inane interview questions or the fact that they don’t stage a massive Free-Tibet-Style Protest against NBC (or CBS or ABC in other years; let’s be fair and balanced, here). The athletes love their sports — revere them, respect their rivals, have trained their entire lives for this moment — and it must be infuriating to watch their work being trivialized so moronically, or even worse, to be forced to participate in the trivialization. I’d go nuts.
The sad thing, folks, is this: there are some really superb sports commentators in the United States. Some of them are even still alive. They must watch this dreck and weep, providing yet more material for the ravenous sob-story writers. You can just see it now: “Jon Miller, forced to watch twenty minutes of Olympics coverage, collapsed in a tearful heap and required sedation. He used to be a much-admired baseball commentator…”
11 August 08
Anniversary
Our fifth wedding anniversary was today! We celebrated by cycling into town for pasta and salad dinner at the Fuzio bistro, followed by ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s. I had mint chocolate chunk, Pica had coffee chunk.
9 August 08
Sketching to Save the World
I signed up for the Sketchbook Project and received, some months ago, a tiny Moleskine notebook with 64 pages to fill on how to save the world. The paper’s fantastic for ink, but I didn’t want to do ink, I wanted to add watercolor, and it was a mess. A MESS. The paper shrivelled up and I lost my enthusiasm for the project.
Then I received the most fantastic paper in the mail: Arches Text Wove. I had ordered a bunch of it for calligraphy — it has a soft tooth and holds a line really well — but I decided to gut the Moleskine and switch in a small accordion-fold text-wove instead. I did this a week ago and got the thing finished and in the mail by the second, extended deadline. Hundreds of these sketchbooks are going to be on display in Atlanta as of August 22. Wish I could go and see them all, but oh well.
Speaking of Saving the World, Ron and Joe have started a fantastic project. Hope it’s wildly successful, guys!!
9 August 08
Out Geary Street
I took the day off and went on a expedition to San Francisco today, heading down by train and then taking the 38 Geary bus to the Outer Richmond district whereupon I walked up to the Legion of Honor museum. I don’t think I’ve been to that art museum in 35 years or so. And they gave me two dollars off admission since I took the bus.
The main exhibition was a show of four women impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, and Mary Cassatt. I particularly liked Morisot’s work. Also at the museum was a small show of Israeli antiquities, including a couple of Dead Sea Scroll fragments and some 5000 year old pottery.
It’s a very pleasant trip to make, an outing to San Francisco for a one-day vacation. I should do it more often.
6 August 08
Ravioli
A huge thank you to Fernanda for taking these photos and for providing a delicious filling for the first batch of ravioli. We ate them all. Her account of this is here, if you can read Portuguese (worth seeing even if you can’t; her photos have gotten professional…). It’s a great party idea: someone brings eggs, everyone brings a filling. And off you go.
4 August 08
Changing of the Pannier
My old Jandd grocery bag pannier finally wore out — in the photo it’s the bag to the left. Saturday I shopped for its replacement, and ended up with the Deuter grocery bag pannier at right. We shall see how well it lasts, but so far I’m pleased with it. It’s a little deeper than than the old pannier, it has a cover that you can close up in inclement weather, and there is a second carry handle which should help guard against the way the old one ripped.
2 August 08
1 August 08
1 August 08
Feeding the Googleplex
I visited the mother spider of the Web today. I spent the day down at Google in Mountain View for a meeting about a project I may end up being involved with. I can report that they keep the Google engineers well-fed. The following were free for the taking:
In the visitors’ area in the building we were in (one of the smaller buildings on their campus): at left a refrigerator filled with Naked Juice fruit juices. (Upstairs was the massage lounge).
The snack room had organic milk, soy milk, and rice milk in the fridge, gourmet chocolates in bins, any number of breakfast cereals, and a half-dozen sorts of fresh fruit available. A sign reminded people to wash the fruit.
Among the options at the lunchtime cafeteria were the following:
- curried vegetables with brown rice
- white bean and chorizo soup
- assorted sandwich ingredients, including sliced heirloom tomatoes
- a salad with mixed baby greens, tarragon dressing, and goat cheese
- a barley salad
- sauteed summer squash and zucchini for veggies
- main entree choices of chicken cacciatore, pasta pomodoro, and steamed mussels
- pizza with caramelized onion and talaggio cheese
- pistachio ice cream
Needless to say, we had a good pre-meeting lunch.