depth first search

The first is about what makes a good blog:

To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you’re using a blog to promote a business, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.

So, for example, if you’re selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don’t talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer.

Now about those Apple patents:

What worries me is that idea that Apple, or even just Steve Jobs, believes that phones like the Nexus One have no right to exist, period, and that patent litigation to keep them off the market is in the company’s interests. I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary.

Apropos my previous post:

He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”

Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science. Instead, the pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work.

Of course if Twitter were around in Darwin’s time he never would have gotten around to writing On the Origin of Species.

A meta-lesson: Microeconomics ain’t easy, and don’t let a regression–or division by a baseline–be a substitute for clear thought. It’s a classic error to analyze a decision as if it were a one-time choice, without recognizing the underlying incentives that make the situation come up repeatedly. It’s disappointing to see Levitt make this mistake and then see him double down and defend his error.

I have a problem with the desire of certain economists to articulate simple models that lead to counter-intuitive results and then argue that our intuition is wrong. Well, sometimes it is, but often it’s not and the model is too simple or the assumptions are incorrect. It’s nice to see someone as notable as Andrew Gelman making a variant (and more specific version) of this same point.

The problematic assumption that Gelman highlights is something that seems to happen over and over again.

As a former database monkey, I have a lot of sympathy for Harry:

If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:

Aarrggghhh!

That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. …”

Don’t worry Harry, we’ll find out how all this climate stuff shakes out in about 50 years or so.

The longest episode narrated in Brother West is its account of the conflict with Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, starting in October 2001. West reports that Summers began their now-legendary meeting by indicating that they should join forces against the neoconservative Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield.

“Help me f___ him up,” said Summers (according to West, says his quasi-ghostwriter).

West had recently released his first hip hop CD, so perhaps Summers thought this would put him at ease. Not so. West says he made clear to Summers that his feeling for Mansfield was collegial.

With popping a cap in a fellow faculty member’s ass now off the table, the exchange then took the form that has now become famous, culminating in Summers’ demand that West make himself available for fortnightly meetings to evaluate his grades and publication plans.

The turning point came in 1999, when Calagione was watching a cooking show on television. The chef, who was making a soup, was saying that several grindings of pepper, added to the pot at different points, would give the dish more flavor than a single dose added at the beginning. Not long afterward, at a Salvation Army store, Calagione came across an old electric football set—the kind with a playing field that vibrates to send miniature players skittering across it. Back at home, he found a five-gallon bucket and drilled some holes in the bottom. He laid a pair of wooden blocks on the football set, put the bucket on the blocks, and strapped the whole thing together with duct tape. (“Pretty high-tech M.I.T. stuff,” he says.) Later, when his kettle was boiling, he put hops in the bucket, perched his contraption at a slant above the kettle, and set the game vibrating. Soon, a steady stream of hops was falling through the bucket onto the playing field and sliding into the kettle.

The beer born of that experiment, known as 60 Minute I.P.A., is still Calagione’s biggest seller. He calls it a beer geek’s idea of a “session beer”—mild enough to be consumed in quantity, but with an unexpected kick. It has the bright, citrusy bouquet of a much hoppier brew, without the bitterness. Wine Enthusiast tasted hints of rose petal, tangerine, orange zest, and nutmeg in it, and rated it a “classic.”

The announcers mentioned this during the game:

5. Colt McCoy. It’s not enough that the guy has won 38 games as a collegiate starter. Or that he completed an NCAA record 77 percent of his passes last season. It’s that he’s the starting quarterback for the University of Texas and his name is COLT MCCOY. Playing football against a quarterback named Colt McCoy is like playing cards against a guy who has the same first name as a city. If you’re at any sort of felt-covered table and a guy sits down and introduces himself as “Memphis,” you walk away. Do not question this.

Be sure to read the rest.

The fact that McChrystal is tough enough and disciplined enough to go running at 4:30 in the morning and visit Afghan markets without a sidearm or a bulletproof vest is not relevant to the questions at hand. But it’s made to seem relevant. As if all the past tacticians who saw their careers and countries swallowed by endless engagement in Afghanistan just didn’t have a low enough resting heart rate.

For one, a lot of the people who have begun cooking more are the people with the maximum number of possible entertainment options. Farmer’s market cooking is considered something of a yuppie pursuit, but it’s not as if that’s a function of insufficiently entertained yuppies.

What strikes me about the Letterman scandal is the complete lack of acknowledgement of any ethical wrongdoing. I mean sure, older men having sex with young female assistants is icky, but nobody seems to be stopping to consider why this is icky.

Even feminist blogs, who really should know better, seen more obsessed with other things than this matter.

Here’s the problem. When superiors in an organization sleep with people who work for them, they are contributing to a culture that says, bluntly, sleeping with the boss is a way to get ahead.

Am I wrong in thinking this? Is the situation more complicated?