Fire and Knowledge

Love everyone.

We live in a culture of pervasive criticism and snark. We dismiss less-successful-seeming people as losers. We fall into the trap of office politics, aligning with one group or the other, hoping it’s got the inside track. How pointless.

Most people you meet at work—regardless of rank or title—know something you don’t. Many people, again despite where they sit in the hierarchy, can be a mentor to you about something. So try to shed your cynicism and listen to every voice. It will make you smarter and more humble. And if smartness and humility end up being the two main traits people see in you, you’re going to be a winner, no matter what the GDP.

—Jack & Suzy Welch, “Dear Graduate (Crisis Version)“

Twitter, in essence, allows you to attend a great big cocktail party filled with diverse and (typically) civilized chatter. Some of what you hear and say will be frivolous. But the chatter will also provoke, inform, and engage you in a way, and at a volume, you can’t replicate offline.

—Jack & Suzy Welch, “Why We Tweet”

(And yes, you can find me on twitter under @jpsowin)

Kevin Kelly talks about the new socialism in Wired:

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now….

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods….

Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn’t solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

Stuart McMillen has created an interesting cartoon based on the foreword of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I agree that Huxley was closer to our future than Orwell — though it was a hard thing to predict, because it depended on whether communism or capitalism would win. Thankfully, capitalism did, and our “fate” is to revel in our own pleasure instead of being controlled by a despotic empire.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take our pseudo-Huxlian future over an Orwellian one any day. It gives freedom to those who want it, and allows slavery to those who need it.

Now there’s a new way to publish your autobiography: The Tweetbook.

A new search engine called Wolfram Alpha “takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does”:

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilisation computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”

I can’t wait to try it out!

I’ve been expecting an on-demand book printer for a while, so I’m glad see it’s finally being done:

It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

There’s a simple and free method to make your iMac screen glare-free that I haven’t heard anyone recommend or discuss yet. It’s so easy that I can’t believe no one has mentioned it.

Maybe because it’s crazy?

Anyway, glossy screens are great for looks. But if you’re sensitive to reflections or struggle with headaches and eyestrain, you do not want a glossy screen. Good God, anything but staring into a glossy screen all day! In spite of that, for some unfathomable reason — and even though their customers want it — Apple has stopped making iMacs with matte displays.

Anti-Glare Add-On Filters Suck

When I got an iMac, I purchased the best anti-glare filter available (by Photodon) which I thought would fix the glare issue. It was laughably bad. It made the image grainy and the screen sparkle as I moved my head. There was no way I’d be able to use it without losing my mind.

I called support. They acknowledged the issue and said that “photographers and graphic designers wouldn’t like it.” I can’t see how anyone would like it, unless they enjoy a screen that sideshows as a kaleidoscope.

I returned it.

The Secret

Then I figured out an even easier and far more effective way to make my iMac screen anti-glare. No, I didn’t replace it: I removed the protective layer in front of the screen.

It ends up the front layer is the main source of gloss — the screen itself has very little reflection! According to my tests, it has about 50% less reflection without the front layer.

Removing the Protective Layer

Removing the layer is surprisingly easy:

1. Get a large suction cup.
2. Attach the section cup at the top left of the screen, then gently pull.
3. With your other hand, pull the right part of the screen and it’ll come right out (it is held on by magnets).
4. Finally, gently pull the bottom toward you until it pops out.

That’s all there is to it. You now have an anti-glare screen!

Here’s a howto video on how to remove the protective layer:

But It’s Not Purdy!

Yeah, that’s true. It doesn’t look as good without that sleek black bevel and the screws exposed. But for me, a little less beauty is a fair price to pay for less headaches and eyestrain. It’s the best way I’ve come up with, but if anyone has a better idea please leave it in the comments.

I’m sure it’s possible to mimic the black bevel border with heavy black paper or plastic, but I haven’t had time to try that yet.

Here’s a business idea for an entrepreneur: Get someone to make a black border that snaps right in and then sell them for $50-100. I’d buy one. And if I had time, I’d have someone make and manufacture it. But I don’t, so it’s up to you.