The Shuffle

The ingenuity of Goldman Sachs in gaming the system never ceases to amaze. To whit:

MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. — Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars.

The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country.

Simply unreal but injecting unnecessary cost into various business operations in order to get a little extra has become the way America does business, just see Government to see how the real pros make it happen.

The Unnecessary Atomization of Knowledge

The NYTimes just posted an interesting article tiled, Losing Our Way in the World, an excellent piece on showing how people seemingly lack knowledge on how to integrate discrete nuggets of data into a comprehensive framework as seen by the quote below.

SADLY, we often atomize knowledge into pieces that don’t have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value.

A number of years ago, the documentary “A Private Universe,” about how we misperceive the world around us, was filmed at Harvard’s commencement. Twenty-three faculty members, alumni and graduating seniors were asked, “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” All but two answered incorrectly, saying the Earth was closer to the sun in the summer than in the winter (it’s actually closer in January).

Arguably, the students were drawing on fragments of what they had learned in class somewhere — didn’t Earth’s orbit form an ellipse around the sun? — instead of what they could perceive themselves, as the seasons changed.

One “correct” answer has to do with the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis with respect to its orbit. But a Neolithic farmer might cast his arm in an arc across the sky and explain that the sun was low in the winter and high in the summer. The farmer’s explanation would be perfectly correct, rooted in experience.

Creative people, in this writers's opinion, avoid this subtle trap as synthesizing new ideas necessarily involve integrating the parts into a comprehensive whole dictated by the specific discipline in which the creative act is housed whether it be composing a masterful work like So What or conceptualizing the theory of relativity while riding on a tram, something education should teach the young in this connected age of the web. 

Thinking like a bug

Common sense or, Thinking like a bug, can give rise to, in this case, a really cool solution to mosquitoes, particularly with a summer as wet and as hot as this one has been.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, my wife and I joined some friends for a barbecue in their backyard. The guests were lively and the space was lovely — grassy and open but shady and surrounded by lots of shrubs and trees.

In other words, it was perfect for mosquitoes — and indeed, closer inspection showed that they were thriving in all that greenery.

But our friends had come up with a solution that saved us from having to deal with bug repellents or, worse, bites and itches.

On a low table, they set up a small electric fan, perhaps 12 inches high, that swept back and forth, sending a gentle breeze across the grassy area where people were sitting.

That was it. No citronella candles, no bug zappers, no DEET, nothing expensive or high-tech. Yet amazingly, it worked. As far as I could tell, no mosquitoes flew into the vicinity of the simulated wind; nobody was bitten.

As we left, I asked our hosts about the fan idea; they credited a mutual friend at the barbecue. He, in turn, paid tribute to a friend of his: Frank Swift, president of Swift Food Equipment Inc. in Philadelphia.

So I reached out to Mr. Swift, who replied by e-mail. “The solution came from trying to think like a bug,” he explained, “and realizing I don’t like flying into a 15 m.p.h. wind.”

Thanks NYTimes, I needed that. :) 

Patent Trolls

Patent Trolls, you know, the companies who make money by suing rather then innovating, is big time business as articulated by the NYTimes in a post titled Have Patent, Will Sue: An Alert to Corporate America.

Mr. Spangenberg’s company, based in Dallas, helps “turn idle patents into cash cows,” as it says on its Web site. A typical client is an inventor or corporation, with a batch of patents, demanding a license fee from what it contends is an infringer, usually a titan in the tech realm. His weapon of choice in this business — the brass knuckles of his trade, so to speak — is the lawsuit.

In the last five years, IPNav has sued 1,638 companies, according to a recent report by RPX, a patent risk management provider, more than any other entity in the patent field. “To get companies to pay attention, in some percent of the market, you need to whack them over the head,” Mr. Spangenberg said. “In our system, you can’t duel, you can’t offer to fight in the street, which would be fine with me.”

The problem with this centers on the fact, only the lawyers profit, not tech, and certainly not innovation as seen by the stupid interface lawsuits going back and forth from Apple and Samsung.

This is partly because the number of patent infringement suits has more than doubled in recent years, to 4,731 cases in 2012 from 2,304 in 2009, according to that RPX report. The cost to businesses, which pass along the expense to consumers, is immense. One study found that United States companies — most of them small or medium-sized — spent $29 billion in 2011 on patent assertion cases.

“And only about $6 billion of that money wound up in the hands of inventors,” said James Bessen, a co-author of the study and a professor at the Boston University School of Law. “As for the other $23 billion, most of it goes to legal expenses, both for defendants and patent troll companies, with the rest going to operating expenses of the trolls — overhead and marketing — and finally, patent troll company profits. That’s why we call this type of litigation a tax on innovation. It discourages innovation much more than it encourages it.”

Yours truly has a patent pending, maybe when it goes live, I can either take the low road and become a patent troll or the high, by innovating. I'll take the 2nd because innovating is a hell of lot more interesting and beneficial then the first option, a course akin to getting something for nothing, something that just seems wrong if you ask me.

Kind of Sums it up to ME

Ah, if only Paddy Chayefsky was alive.

Adrift - A glimpse Into Wonder

Fog, forever mysterious and wondrous, shows it's hidden beauty through the lens of Simon Christen

Crazy Fast

Crazy fast kind of explains it to me. :)

Interfaces @ 50

Hard to believe but sci-fi interface design has been around for 50+ years, something pretty amazing without question. This info graphic from infographicjournal shows just how far tech has evolved regarding the front end side of hardware ranging from the quasi schlock of Lost in Space to the incandescent 2001, the greatest science fiction film of all time. Enjoy.

A True Visionary

True visionaries are as rare as natural black pearls, occurrences of each being most mysterious but ever present with society never knowing when such an entity possessing these singular qualities will show up. Jobs, Einstein, Davis and Tesla, being members of this exceedingly rare breed, changed society in ways that cannot be quantified, must now include Douglas C. Engelbart, a computer visionary who intuitively knew what computers could become 20+ years before the advent of systems able to be accessed by means extending beyond the ubiquitous punch card based on the mechanics of the 18th century Jacquard loom.

Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction. But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind.

In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II. The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.

It was his great insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called their “collective I.Q.”

Because he had read Vannevar Bush's amazing 1945 paper As We May Think, the first expression of what the web would eventually become 50 years later, (BRT The Memex) Engelbart took Bush's ideas to the next level by conceptualizing networked machines able to drive the internet that Bush was talking about using a keyboard, mouse and display to make it happen, hardware conceived of in his mind years before tech would catch up with his unique vision. To make sure such hardware could actually be developed, Engelbart invented the mouse, the device we know and love, as the prime interface driver for all things digital in the connected age of the web. Click here to see The Mother of All Demos to see why. Addendum, here is the Stamford University version of The MOAD. :)

Seen above are Englebart's patent drawings of the mouse and how it connected to a computer complete with keyboard and display. Said patent was approved on November 17th from a paper he gave to the patent office on June 21, 1967. Click here to see the patent. 

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine. - Nikola Tesla

Being Green

Look at this picture carefully and then read the caption below, sent to me by a good friend of mine talking about how it was back in the day. :)

Being Green

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much

older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this 'green

thing' back in my earlier days."

The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the 'green thing' in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling's. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn't do the "green thing" back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the "green thing" in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana .

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the "green thing" back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a

cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the "green thing" back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family's $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the "green thing."

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances.

And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the "green thing" back then?

I do remember some of these things so at least my memory hasn't left me though my hearing has. :)