Author: andy

War of the Worlds

Heres an interesting archive of classic shows from Orson Welles’s ‘The Mercury Theatre on the Air’ radio show series, in MP3 format. It includes the notorious broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds’  (mp3) that started mass-panic in parts of the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_radio_broadcast (Their server seems kind of slow, so be kind to it if you intend to download a lot of files)

Long Tail

Wired: The Long Tail:

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail”). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. 

Informality

Paul Graham’s article What the Bubble Got Right got a lot of interest on Slashdot a couple of days ago. While its definitely worth a read, I don’t feel knowledgeable to comment on much of it. One passage, however, caught my eye:

In New York, the Bubble had dramatic consequences: suits went out of fashion. They made one seem old. So in 1998 powerful New York types were suddenly wearing open-necked shirts and khakis and oval wire-rimmed glasses, just like guys in Santa Clara.

The pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked reaction by the clothing industry. But I’m betting on the open-necked shirts. And this is not as frivolous a question as it might seem. Clothes are important, as all nerds can sense, though they may not realize it consciously.

If you’re a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you’d feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn’t it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.

And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one’s ideas. That’s the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as “suits.”

Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.

This is just so right. I’ve lost count of the number of times that people in a business setting just assume that, out of a group of people, the guy in the suit is just somehow more knowledgeable/clueful than anyone else.