AIG and Third Rock?

John Lithgow is a great actor. Edward M. Liddy (not to be confused with G. Gordon) is also pretty good.

Lithgow has had a lot of great roles. Liddy is also pretty funny. Both names begin with "Li". I think they even sort of look similar.


















I have to believe that Liddy is basically trying to emulate Lithgow's hilarity with this bonus thing. It certainly seems like something from Third Rock. That is really the only reasonable explanation.

Source for photos:
Lithgow: Wikipedia
Liddy: NYT

Kosmix vs. CoolIris

I just read a review of Kosmix.com in the NYT. It is supposed to be a new and upcoming cool thing. The author of that article compared Kosmix to google, by way of saying "do not compare Kosmix with google." I went to the Kosmix site and performed a couple of searches. It is correct not to compare Kosmix with google. All Kosmix does, so far I can tell, is parse the search results content into categories: web, video, blog, etc. Hardly novel or interesting. (Kosmix has a "new" service to allow you to specify keywords to drive the news content you want. Whoa! Cutting edge stuff. Five years ago.)

I am no fan of google. Kosmix is a fan of google, so much so that they basically return google results by category. You can "add your site to Kosmix" if you send them an email. An email? Yes, an email. On a scale of 1 to 5, that ranks as lame. So much for automated services.

CoolIris and CoolPreviews, on the other hand, are very interesting and somewhat novel. And you do not have to send them an email. If you have not tried CoolIris and CoolPreviews, you should have a look-see.

CoolIris is a sort of desktop application that presents web content in a metaphor that is as close to the "Minority Report" pre-crime application interface as I have seen. I think it is the next (or maybe current) predominant UI paradigm.

CoolPreviews is a browser plugin that displays the content of a link in a frame over the current window. You preview the content in the target by hovering over the CP icon beside every link.

CoolPreviews can sometimes get in the way, but not generally, and you can turn it on and off quite easily. CoolIris is, well, really very cool.

Score
CoolIris: 8
CoolPreviews: 7
Kosmix: 2 (for effort - it's a hard time to be a start-up)

NPR - National Dramatic Radio

National Public Radio is trying everything possible not simply to become a dreadful place. It is not having much success. The news of the economy is almost never positive.

NPR is not in decline simply because of the economy, though. It is helping with its own brand of drama - terrible journalism. The recent story on college students with ADD sharing their Adderall was both devoid of any real utility and suffered from a complete dearth factual underpinning. Does such anecdotal fluff really constitute world news?

The dramatic crisis language used to conclude the Adderall story caused me nearly to be flung from my treadmill. A breathy voice invoked the fearful consequences of inaction regarding a complete non-problem. In a word, the piece was completely terrible!

A few college students sometimes take amphetamines! That's a story?

I hear more of this type of story on NPR than in earlier years. Maybe the frequency is the same, and I am more attuned.

I am going to stop listening to these stories. I hope I stop listening because NPR stops broadcasting these stories. The alternative is my iPod. It's a dangerous weapon, but I am willing to use it.

On Economic Predictions

I must say that I am very impressed with the ability of various economists and other prognosticators to accurately diagnose the month, day and hour that the recovery will take hold. Seriously, how can they even show their faces? Their understanding and prediction of the crisis itself is matched only by the CIA's success predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Union at end of the cold war. Yet they spew their pithy opinion as though it were knowledge -- and I hear them parroted by family, friends and colleagues alike -- all day long, every day of the week. Of course we are depressed. The world isn't as horrible as the news.

Here is my prediction. The economic crisis will be over when we trust it is over. It will be followed by an economic recovery. Early trusters will cause it. Later trusters will engage later. Business trusters will need to believe it, because they will drive it.

The bailout may help.

A much greater help would be for all of us to turn off NPR and CNN. It will help tremendously if we all completely abandon the news for a few months: Total news blackout. I predict that, if we completely ignore the media for three to six months, we will return in late summer or fall to find the world in much better shape than we thought possible. Otherwise, the media output will continue to put pressure on the availability and price of cheap wine.

I should admit that, once the blackout starts, I may continue occasionally to read David Brooks' column, and sneak a secret peek at Gail Collins. We all have our addictions.

So let's all go out together and buy something today, and every day.

Regarding the economic turn-around, I hope it is not long.

Government Transformation at $800 Billion

What do we know about transformation?
What have we learned about growth?
Is living through just dumb luck?
Can we hit the targets?

I watched a motorcyclist jump onto a large trailer.
Rather, I watched him miss, and crash under it.
His was a transformative experience.
He was transformed into a saline sack of shattered fragments.
He survived to cameo a bit part in the movie.

There was more concrete data available to plan that motorcycle jump than the federal bailout.
We do not know the speed required to succeed at this jump.
State and federal government stimulus packages are largely ahistorical.
There is no known or tested or even secret formula available to propel the economy onto that distant ramp.
There is no precedent.
We have never been here.
We have never succeeded in this space before, and never failed.
We must all be great fiction writers.
The goal of such fiction is the biography of Garcia-Marquez:
Living to Tell the Tale.

I have transformed small things with that specific goal in mind.
Houses. Land. Organizations. Kids.
I can point to a few successes.
I learn more from the failures.
I have learned three lessons.

First: Praxis.
Doing nothing yields an equivalent result.
Theory must be indistinguishable from action.
Every hypothesis, every thought, must result in some perceptible pressure on the rudder.
A thousand tiny points comprise a smoother arc than one grand theory.

Second, abort failure as early as possible.
Early failure is better than late failure.
Isolated failure is better than total failure.
A course correction is preferable to any of them.

Third, transformation is positivistic.
It must be realized to be real.
A Kuhnian paradigm shift replaces more than the skin it sheds.

I have never guided the type of transformation that involves filtering hundreds of billions of dollars through the bitter and opaque filters of state and federal bureaucracies.
My credentials are the exactly same as everyone else on the planet in this regard.
I would be capable...
Of failing,
Of succeeding,
Of some interpretable outcome.

I trust myself as much as I trust those in charge.
Equally.
Good luck to them and to us.
Perhaps, in the worst case, we will all survive to cameo a bit part in the movie.

Letter from a Friend

On the far side 

A field of troubled clover grows 

The reeds are all doubled over 

A girl from Carolina sits alone 

She cries and cries and cries 

The ocean sprays its salt in the sand 

The dunes blow flattened into the sea 

Sentimental contrails banished forever 

The equality of the netherworld 

I read this post card 

I think of you 

On the far side

Who is Watching Whom

There are three invisible shadows
I cannot see the monsters
I cannot see their shadows
What if they find out
A dog is barking
A candle burns in a pumpkin
On the porch across the street
The empty lot beside it
The empty lot beside it
Someone is tying a string to a pole
The wind blows it out of his hand
Into the monster's face
I cannot see their shadows
What if they find out.