“metaphors”

Why read David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom^AM:

Remember those classic time-lapse^WP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?^YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin Frankel^{WP, ELZR}, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin)

I can’t remember where I got this notion that Google Finance was just an uninteresting, me-too product¹ from Google, but the prejudice set in without my noticing (as, alas, so many do) and it was strong enough that I hadn’t deigned to pay them a visit until I chanced upon them today.

Here are some screenshots of both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (the current king of the hill) set to display Google’s stock information. There’s simply no comparison: Google outshines Yahoo “in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”^EEM

¹ Perhaps it filtered somehow from the popularish blog GigaOM, who to my utter amazement finds Google Finance “downright tiresome and plain ugly.. clearly.. a me-too move.”

Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.

I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)

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.

Simile is a simple, snappy AJAX timeline from MIT. To keep with the space-time musings of late, it’s a Google Maps for time.

Marketing Myopia^WP, from the recently deceased economist Theodore Levitt^WP is a fascinating article from 1960. Despite its now quaint and outdated examples, despite being wrong in several of its predictions, this is one of the classic articles of marketing and deservedly so. Perhaps the biggest surpise for me was to reread a sense of marvel and respect at business, a lucid and bracing criticism of capitalism, that I hadn’t seen since I read some Peter Drucker^WP last year. The “intellectual” community, specially in Mexico, has so often made deriding business and its babbits its raison d’etre, that I find such cogent analysis incredibly refreshing.

Here two fragments:

At the end of the article, there’s an equally engaging retrospective commentary fifteen years after. Levitt could write.

As a sidenote, this was an article originally published in the Harvard Business Review, which I’ve always dismissed on the base of its exorbitating price. I’ve been reading through online article abstracts from the current edition and I’m most impressed. I’ll be sure to buy it next time.

(heh, not that I’m gloating or anything (as if there was something to gloat about) but it’s the best post-electoral pun I’ve heard yet and I’m sure it’ll cheer Adolfo up ;)

I’ve been pretty uncomfortable these days with this blog.

I understand that and yet I want a change of cage. It may be foolish, but so what? It may not. I want something more à la Gelernter’s information beams. I want my blog to be a stream-of-consciousness. The textstream to the right of this blog has been one of my favorite and most active sections lately but I’m sure most simply miss it. It feels odd there, buried at the side, violating some deep semantic principle, overcrowding the already overcrowded sidebar.

These days, even pigeons have blogs. They provide them with electronic recording equipment and their output is automatically fed into a blog.  —Wait! Pause for a minute to wonder how profoundly weird that is. Done? Go!—  In a way I’m like that, sometimes I’m but a text pigeon, reporting what I find amid the words. And I’m proud of that.