Biz vs Dev

This week: How new technologies earn our trust, and why it’s so hard.

Mik said it was Ep 27 in the intro. But you and me? We know it’s not.

Thanks for reading the show notes!

links:

• Steelcase on Environment in the workplace
• Gensler on Environment in the workplace
• HBR (October, 2014)
• Email Mik: [email protected]
• New York Times on Soylent
• Sprouts.io
• Most corn is fed to cattle
• Deng Xiaoping: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat”
• Bertrand Russell: “In Praise of Idleness” (full text, or buy on amazon)

Books:

• The Power of Place
• Pandoras seed
• The Happiness Hypothesis

(music: “So Fine” by Shenandoah and the Night)

This week: How James created a successful open source project, and the parallels between trust in business and romantic relationships.

links:

• Pydub
• City Mapper
• Plated
• Blue Apron
• Sweet Roots
• Plague Inc (game)
• f.lux
• Twilight for Android
• Nobel prize in Physics: Blue LEDs
• Google “Why am I...” in NYC will suggest “...so tired”

Book recommendation:

• The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin

(music: “So Fine” by Shenandoah and the Night)

This week: We talk about Focus. James’ Soylent arrived, and a little about Typography.

links:

• Soylent
• Garden of life
• Exo bars made with cricket flour
• Moshe Safdie’s TED talk, How to reinvent the apartment building
• Paul Graham: Before the Startup
• Simon Sinek: Start with Why
• Elon Musk article on Aeon Magazine

Book recommendations:

• M. Scott Peck: The Road Less Traveled
• Ellen Lupton: Thinking With Type
• Ellen Lupton: Type on Screen

(music: “So Fine” by Shenandoah and the Night)

links:

• INE ventures
• James’ Toy Swift app (Grocery List)
• BuzzFeed reported on a tobacco ad which reportedly invented the word “like” (#14)
• Hemingway App
• “Hemingway” on Hemingway
• Free Jazz
• Article about books most frequently abandoned and article about most unread books and the Hawking Index
• On Writing Well
• George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

Writing sample (From Das Kapital)

I originally planned to just cross out words. But since that required changing tenses and conjugations, I’ll just provide the original and the revised version.

The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. In its qualitative aspect, or formally considered, money has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and, therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy. This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative boundlessness, continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like labour of accumulating. It is with him as it is with a conqueror who sees in every new country annexed, only a new boundary.

James’ revisions:

The desire to hoard is fundamentally unsatiable. Qualitatively, money has unlimited efficacy – it’s the universal representation of material wealth – because it’s convertible into any commodity. But, every actual sum of money is a fixed amount, so it has a limited efficacy as a means of purchasing. This antagonism between the limits and boundlessness of money continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like labour of accumulating. He’s like a conqueror who, with each new country they annex, just sees a new boundary.

(music: “So Fine” by Shenandoah and the Night)

links:

• Zoolander “In the computer” (preceded by this)
• Forbes: “Why Marc Andreessen Knows Nothing About Low-Income America and Neither Do You”
• Hailo - Helps you hail a cab
• Colorado embraces ride-sharing by being the first state to legalize it
• Mik claimed that clear alcohol is easier on the liver, which wasn’t entirely accurate. A few related bits to discuss here: Darker beers and wines tend to have more antioxidants. But they also contain more cogeners, the toxic chemical byproducts of the fermentation proces. The darker the alcohol, the greater the cogener concentration. Darker spirits=worse hangovers More detailed reading on alcohol myths
• Perfumes ward off infection: Museum of London
• Robert Bly’s, “Iron John: A Book About Men”
• Wade Davis’s, “The Wayfinders”
• Book: “Original Wisdom”
• Ubuntu
• Britain’s cigarette ban for people born after 2000
• Bacchus was the Roman equivalent of Dionysus, which would explain the interchangeable modern day usage of ‘dionysian’ and ‘bacchanalian’
• Roger Dodger Trailer
• Fred Wilson: “No Pain No Gain”
• Mik confused two Emerson essays. Naturlangsamkeit (the slowness of nature) is from his essay, “Friendship”. Both “Friendship” and “Self-Reliance” are chockfull of wisdom, and likely worthy of an annual re-reading.
• Jobr (not Tippr): Tinder for jobs
• Grassroots Tavern A bar in St Marks Place that is on the quieter side

(music: “So Fine” by Shenandoah and the Night)