“japan”

What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.

Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:

“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”

“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”

I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)

To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodification^WP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

All three of them long (9,000 words average), all three of them remarkable. Favorite to least-favorite-but-still-remarkable,

Unhappy Meals By Michael Pollan January 28, 2007

What should we eat?

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

..A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Darwin’s God By Robin Marantz Henig March 4, 2007

How can we explain belief in God?

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels—that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

From 0 to 60 to World Domination By Jon Gertner February 18, 2007

A look at Toyota.

By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate” — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined.

(...and a teriyaki New Year!)

Last night’s dinner, courtesy of Nippon-do (Miguel Ángel no. 224 Tel: 36-41-29-69) —in my opinion, Guadalajara’s best kept oriental secret. They even cooked it all at 10PM so we would eat it hot!

As a lapsed gamer myself, Nintendo’s new strategy—simplicity, in several senses—makes a lot of sense and strikes me as a major step in the evolution of our tech gizmos. Since a 1995 Gameboy, the DS^WP is the last handheld console that I remember caring for (and that’s mostly for that intriguing Brain Age^WP game).

The weird thing about fetishy pics^ELZR like the one below is they’re so beyond-words good if you were actually on the look for them you wouldn’t find any. This one, for instance, I found yesterday (here) while looking for pictures of sakura^WP, cherry blossoms, on Imagery.

Yesterday I went to the first International Gastronomic Fair in Guadalajara and it was on the whole quite bad, but I did chance on several interesting finds (photoset):

As I mentioned a week ago, I am just starting to feel my way around McKinsey’s Quarterly but it’s been impressive so far. I recently finished reading the three complimentary articles I was granted upon registering (which is free) and they were all remarkable.

This personal description still has me happy—it gives me the hope^ELZR Friedman talked about at the end of his MIT lecture—and, well, befuddled. I mean, how can you do so much in so little time, how? I found it on the about page of Humanized, a collaborative blog on interface design and business-to-be. (He is the son of Jef Raskin^WP btw, that explains some of it.)

Aza Raskin
President

Aza brings over six years of interface design and consulting experience to Humanized. He gave his first talk on interface design at his local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI at the age of 13, got hooked, and has been speaking ever since. By the age of 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; by age 19, he was coauthoring a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; and at age 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Aza has also done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. For recreation, he does Judo, speaks Japanese, and invents in his lab. He also enjoys playing the French Horn^WP, which has brought him all over the world as a soloist. Be warned: Aza is an incorrigible punster, so please do not incorrige.

On the flip side, it cheers me up that such blatant^A geniuses (read the entire about page for the rest of the profiles) are interested in my chosen area too. Interface design will be the art form of the twenty-first century. Mind my words.