Month: June 2012

I am a fan of neither the NBA nor of movies, really.

But when I read Roger Ebert I want to watch movies:

Tom Russell was a 10-year-old Adelaide schoolboy when he made “Last Ride,” his feature film debut. I have run out of words to account for young actors. Untrained, they seem able to reach an instinctive core of natural truth. Russell is in almost every scene, as authoritative as the adult actors. They say in a film or a story that you must focus on the characters who change, and in “Last Ride,” all of Kev’s changes are behind him, but Chook is arriving at his young life’s turning point.

For director Glendyn Ivin, this is also a debut feature, although he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for a short subject. Remarkable, how he begins with materials that could have given themselves so easily to a road movie formula, and finds such truth and beauty. He knows so surely where he’s going that he arrives at a perfect final shot, that tells us what we need to know about Chook.

And when I read Bill Simmons I want to watch basketball:

You know what saddens me? The funniest clip on YouTube is no longer funny. Yep, you can finally rest in peace, “The Heat Welcome Party” video. Thanks for giving us two sterling years atop the Internet comedy rankings. We’re replacing you with a bullpen by committee of old reliables like “I Like Turtles,” “Charlie Bit Me,” the “It’s Still Real to Me, Dammit” guy, Journey’s immortal “Separate Ways” video and even the “I Like Turtles” techno remix. You will be buried officially during Monday’s championship parade in Miami. We will bury you not once, not twice, not three times … just kidding, we’re only burying you once.

Let’s hope you don’t resurface as something else — something scarier, something more ominous, something on the level of Namath guaranteeing Super Bowl III or Ali promising to defeat Liston. See, the ceiling of “The Heat Welcome Party” slowly changed during the last two games of the 2012 Finals. It’s no longer about hubris or a suffocating lack of self-awareness. It might be more of an omen, a warning, a little like the Game of Thrones characters seeing a red comet streak across the sky and saying, Uh-oh, dragons are coming. I mention this only because, like every other non-Miami fan who attended the last two home games, I left that arena muttering to myself, “Shit … he finally figured it out.”

But whenever these great writers sucker me into their subjects, I am disappointed. I don’t have the patience to care about great movies and I don’t have whatever it takes to care about great basketball.

Luckily I don’t need to care for their subjects. Great writing stands on its own.

Critics of intelligence research often hail the importance of practice rather than inborn talent, but a three-day test of the Minnesota twins’ motor skills showed that how much you benefit from practice is itself partly an inborn talent.

More here.

1. Reddit on money.

2. Big data in the NBA:

The technology was originally developed to track missiles. Now, SportVU systems hang from the catwalks of 10 NBA arenas, tiny webcams that silently track each player as they shoot, pass, and run across the court, recording each and every move 25 times a second. SportVU can tell you not just Kevin Durant’s shooting average, but his shooting average after dribbling one vs. two times, or his shooting average with a defender three feet away vs. five feet away. SportVU can actually consider both factors at once, plus take into account who passed him the ball, how many minutes he’d been on the court, and how many miles he’d run that game already.

A business-idea thought experiment I like to play is: in what ways could you generate an extraordinary amount of data from your daily life? Tracking your movements? Social interactions? Brain activity? Here’s a related earlier post.

3. The economy remains weak, but one millstone is lightening up:

In a reversal of fortune, the only recent good news has been from the housing sector. Housing starts were down slightly in May, but that was because of the volatile multi-family sector. The details were better: single family starts were up, revisions to previous reports were up, and permits were up sharply.

The headline number for existing home sales was a little weak, but the key number – inventory – was down in May, and down over 20% from May 2011. However away from housing, the economic data was very weak.

On the fork:

the time of Henry III, fork-owners would have been well-off, and most of them would have had one set of cutlery that traveled with them; there are numerous examples of forks and knives housed in carrying cases that could be slung over a shoulder or around a waist. It wasn’t until the late 1600s and early 1700s that people began to purchase multiple sets of silverware for their homes, which were just beginning to be equipped with rooms specifically set aside for dining. It was also around this time that forks with three and then four tines were made. Even as the fork gained ground, it was not universally accepted.

Twitter went down today and here’s an insightful comment on HN:

I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly.
I’m fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren’t told “We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down.” Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn’t really understand the risk.

Just like the recent outages of Heroku and EC2, and just like the financial crisis of 2008 which was laughably called a “16-sigma event”, it seems pretty clear that the actual assessment of risk is pretty poor. The way that Heroku failed, where invalid data in a stream caused failure, and the way that EC2 failed, where a single misconfigured device caused widespread failure, just shows that the entire area of risk management is still in its infancy. My employer went down globally for an entire day because of an electrical grid problem, and the diesel generators didn’t failover properly, because of a misconfiguration.

You would think after decades that there would be a better analysis and higher-quality “best practices”, but it still appears to be rather immature at this stage. Is this because the assessment of risk at a company is left to people that don’t understand risk, and that there is an opportunity for “consultants” who understand this, kind of like security consultants?

The problem, of course, is that risk management will forever be in its infancy relative to risk-generating processes. That’s because the things that cause risk are where the money is made.

Arnold Kling has a nice way of summarizing a more enlightened approach to risk management: “make things easier to fix rather than harder to break”.  Nassim Taleb would phrase the downside to making things harder to break as ‘fragility’.

Consider nuclear technology: fantastic if the risks are managed properly. But the downside to a problem is just so immense it may be the case that there is NO SUCH THING as an adequate safety system.

Remember what happened at Chernobyl, where the big accident happened during a rather benign systems test.

To get accurate results from the test, the operators turned off several of the safety systems, which turned out to be a disastrous decision.

They deliberately turned the systems off. Model that!