Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Why the nano is 750 times better than the Walkman

More fun with philosophy math, following up on two earlier posts: Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800 and Why life in America is 40 times better than in 1900.

Focusing on innovations in music technology, Russ Roberts notes:

“In 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman, the first portable music player. It weighed 14 ounces and cost $200. It could play a cassette that could hold about 90 minutes of music. It was a little bigger than a cassette. It was pretty ugly.
“A new nano from Apple was announced yesterday. It weighs less than an ounce. The 8GB model is $149. It holds about 60 hours of music. It is smaller than a matchbook. It is very beautiful.
“So it is cheaper (even without accounting for inflation), weighs 1/15th as much, and holds about 40 times more music of higher quality. I can’t get over how beautiful it is.”

So cool: the nano’s price is better by 25%, it’s more portable by a factor of 15, and its quantity of music is greater by a factor of 40.

1.25 x 15 x 40 = 750.

[But no matter how rigorous the math, I am not giving up my old 1990 Kenwood, still going strong after all these years, and which I wrote about here.]

St. Louis’s Gateway Arch

Sadly, the Gateway Arch is showing signs of corroding.

The Arch is one of my favorite monuments, standing on the western bank of the Mississippi, symbolizing and inviting one to embark upon the great trek to new territory. St. Louis was part of the Louisiana Purchase; Lewis and Clark geared up for their expedition on the east side of the river at Camp Dubois; and St. Louis was a key port for steamboat traffic in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here is a picture of the Arch I took last year when in St. Louis to interview sports entrepreneur David Checketts for Kaizen.

FindTheBest.com — Kevin O’Connor’s latest

Check out FindTheBest.com, which allows you to compare all sorts of things. The Internet gives you access to indefinite amounts of information, but how does one sort the relevant from the irrelevant?

The site is co-founded by Internet entrepreneur Kevin O’Connor, who was co-founder of the very successful DoubleClick.com. O’Connor describes the thinking that led to the development of FindTheBest.com:

“I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their ‘top 10′ recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting ‘kickbacks’ from the sites they were recommending.”

Last year I interviewed O’Connor for Kaizen on the theme of Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. Well worth reading.

Update: A short interview here with O’Connor about his new comparison engine (not search engine).

Interview with John Chisholm

My full interview with software entrepreneur John Chisholm is now online at CEE’s site. An abridged version of the interview was published in the April issue of Kaizen [pdf].

The interview’s theme is Entrepreneurship and Customer Satisfaction. Two sample excerpts, the first on what’s best about being an entrepreneur:

“Creating something of value out of nothing, and the camaraderie of fellow team members. Two milestones in a start-up’s life are particularly exciting: 1) when you realize that even if you disappeared today, the company has enough momentum and people committed to it that it will continue without you; and 2) when you realize that it has genuine value and others want to acquire it.”

And the second on the CEO’s role in fostering healthy corporate culture:

“I don’t think a CEO can control culture directly, but he or she hugely influences it. Culture emerges from how people treat each other and how decisions are made. The CEO’s behavior is critical, because people look to that example and copy it. Genuinely believing that people are important is necessary for any organization’s success. If you do, people will recognize, appreciate and respond to it; if you don’t, they will recognize and resent it. You cannot fake it.”

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or at CEE’s site here.

Pomo and the evils of social media

I invite you to read the abstract to this published (!) paper [pdf] by academics Antonio Maturano and Sergio Belluci.

You will learn that Facebook is a “tool able to amplify an individual‘s alienation and narcissism, which, are a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism.”

You will nod in sage agreement that “Facebook is not a promising example of a new shift from capitalism to a new form of economy based on openness, peering, sharing and global action.” [Emphasis added.]

And you will realize the obvious truth “under Marxist theory” that the new social media are “disguised forms of advanced capitalism aimed at eroding space to more challenging modes of Internet collectivism.”

Take that, you social-media-using patsies. Tools of the Man once again.

(omg i gotta fb and tweet this asap to my peeps.)

Or it could also be, as my friend Steve put it in commenting on the above, that “Postmodernism is alive and well and taking stupidity to new heights.”

Ray Stata on entrepreneurship and technology leadership

My full interview with Ray Stata is now online at CEE’s site. (An abridged version of the interview was published in the December issue of Kaizen [pdf].)

Ray Stata is Chairman of Analog Devices, Inc., based in Norwood, Massachusetts. Working out of his basement, Mr. Stata co-founded Analog Devices in the 1960s. As of 2009, ADI serves over 60,000 customers, has 9,000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion.

The interview’s theme is Entrepreneurship and Technology Leadership. Two sample excerpts, the first on the best kind of education:

“We’re finding that it is very, very challenging to be at the top of your game as an engineer. First, the technical knowledge required is both deep and broad, often cutting across multiple disciplines. And products are so complex that it often takes large teams of engineers with different specialties working across international borders. That requires human skills and communication skills to encourage collaboration and manage teams with quite varied backgrounds and experiences. And engineers must understand the financial implications of manufacturing and product development cost, as well as customer requirements and where products should be positioned in the market with respect to competition. The most successful engineers truly are ‘Renaissance Men’ and not just technical specialists.”

And the second on trust:

“First, one way or other you’ve got to be good at something, even though that something will no doubt change over time. As you enter your career, strive to achieve excellence at whatever you do.
“Back to some of the things we talked about, you soon find out that you don’t get very much accomplished in life on your own. Now there are exceptions, like musicians, artists and writers who can go off on their own and accomplish remarkable things. But most of us find that we accomplish more by working in concert with others to leverage our combined skills and competencies.
“I’ve found that one of the most important factors in being a leader, or more generally in engaging with people, is to build trustful relationships. What does that mean? Trust is built on honesty, integrity, reliability, sincerity, competence. Conduct yourself so that people can depend on what you say and what you do, on the fact that you’re more often right than wrong, on the fact that you meet your commitments, on the fact that you are straight with people and tell it how it is. If people trust you and you trust them, you can get a lot more out of relationships and out of life.”

Update: Ray Stata will be commencement speaker for MIT’s 2010 graduation ceremony.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or at CEE’s site here.

Bridge over the Colorado River

From Popular Science’s “Looking Back at the 100 Best Innovations of 2009.” I love the drama of this photo of a bridge being constructed over the Colorado River:

You can almost feel the drive of the bridge’s arch sections to meet and complete themselves. It struck me as analogous to the energy flow between God’s and Adam’s hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Man.

Creators indeed.

Here’s the description of the bridge at Popular Science:

“Temperatures upward of 115°F, winds capable of felling cranes, an 890-foot drop below: ‘Inhospitable’ doesn’t begin to describe conditions at the Colorado River’s new Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

“A 1,900-foot span designed to divert traffic from the narrow, switchback-laden road across the Hoover Dam, it will be the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere when it opens next fall, with 106 segments of ultra-high-strength concrete forming a twin-rib arch. Workers scaled the canyon’s walls, digging notches for concrete foundation columns. To construct the 1,060-foot-long arch, they cast 24 feet of concrete at a time, while a separate, temporary cable-stayed bridge held up the unfinished ends until the gap was closed this year.”

For more wonderful, dramatic, and just plain interesting innovations from 2009 in Security, Health, Entertainment, Auto Tech, Computing, Building Technology, and more, visit Popular Science’s feature.

Heidegger, anti-humanism, and the Left

Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009).

Some key quotations from Black’s essay with some commentary from me:

“The philosopher still makes some academics feel itchily uncomfortable, not because they truly believe his Nazism will leap from the pages of his works, but because his deeply anti-humanist arguments sound a little too familiar.”

Indeed. In the academic world, especially in the Humanities, we are surrounded by anti-humanists postmodernists, left environmentalists, extreme animal activists, and various other sub-species. (I sometimes wonder whether—for the sake of truth in advertising—we should rename the “Humanities” divisions in our colleges the “Anti-Humanities.” Not that I am bitter or anything.)

Yet there is a bit of a puzzle for some commentators given that, on the usual (ridiculous) Left-Right political spectrum, Heidegger and the Nazis are often place on the “Right” while most of Heidegger’s contemporary fellow-travelers are on the “Left.” Tim Black notes: “Heidegger’s influence is such that any attempt to see the fascist thread loses itself in the weave and weft of an immense, largely leftish legacy.”

So we have to go up a level of abstraction to see the connections. Just as “left” Communism and “right” Nazism are two particular applications of a broader collectivist and authoritarian political vision, Heidegger’s particular philosophy and contemporary postmodernists’ particular philosophy share essentially the same anti-reason and anti-human vision.

Black puts it this way: “The discomfort Heidegger’s Nazism repeatedly causes is revealing. … Heidegger prompts discomfort precisely because he was a Nazi propagating a non-Nazi philosophy. He is just not alien enough. His is a philosophical vision that sits too comfortably with many mainstream attitudes, whether it’s an environmentalist assault upon human hubris or a snobbish disdain for consumerism.”

And of Heidegger’s more abstract philosophical commitments, i.e., his stance against reason and modernity, Black says: “what remained consistent throughout, from the Letter on Humanism to the Question Concerning Technology, was that veiled, abstracted, but nonetheless, resonant critique of modernity, and the human-centred rationality he discerned at its fallen heart … . His thought resonates not because he was a Nazi, but because his criticism of modernity echoes many of today’s anti-modern trends.”

Exactly right. Heidegger’s Nazism is a particular application of his broader anti-humanism, and his philosophical influence has to be understood from that level of abstraction and generality. Heideggerian anti-humanism can be applied particularly in a number of ways, so that is why we find his continued resonance with today’s postmodernists, left environmentalists, neo-Luddites, and man-hating animal activists, and the rest.

My own discussion of Heidegger appears in Chapter Three (pp. 58-67) of my Explaining Postmodernism. Four sections of that chapter are devoted to Heidegger:
* “Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition”
* “Setting aside reason and logic”
* “Emotions as revelatory”
* “Heidegger and postmodernism”
That chapter is also available at the Explaining Postmodernism page.