Odd Quanta

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I was completely blown away by the first preview of [title of show] yesterday at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway. Check out the action at the stage door after!

Heidi was gorgeous (and what a voice!), Hunter was lovable, Jeff beamed (and his tunes move me as much as when I first heard them!), and Susan made the show matter. Larry got so much applause when he first walked out on stage that I was afraid he wouldn't be able to start the show. Wow.

It's been a long journey. I'm proud of y'all.

This is funny, I found this on the web at BroadwayWorld.com. Look carefully behind Hunter/Jeff/Susan/Heidi/Larry and director Michael Berresse, and see who's there...

Going Singing (Welsh, Spanish)

I'm looking forward to joining The North American Welsh Choir in October on a singing trip to Welsh Patagonia.

I'm not Welsh, but I am North American.

In order to create, you gotta produce!

Stumbled upon, at blog.pmarca.com: Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data. Research by Dr. Dean Simonton of U.C. Davis:

[C]reativity is a probabilistic consequence of productivity, a relationship that holds both within and across careers.
Within single careers, the count of major works per age period will be a positive function of total works generated each period, yielding a quality ratio that exhibits no systematic developmental trends.
And across careers, those individual creators who are the most productive will also tend, on the average, to be the most creative: Individual variation in quantity is positively associated with variation in quality.

Time to get to work.

Thurgood on Broadway

I went the other night to see Laurence Fishburne in his one-man show Thurgood at the Booth Theatre. Sat in the first row. The entire stage set consisted of the big table and lectern from behind which lawyers stood before the court. It was extraordinary storytelling; great script, great acting.

He talked at length about the behind-the-scenes arguments at the NAACP before and during Brown v Board of Education, and it brought back memories of driving around Knoxville with Glenn Reynolds hearing about the classes in Constitutional Law he was teaching.

February Is Almost Over

Mom noticed that I hadn't posted anything in the month of February, and was worried about me. She can rest easy. It's not because there is nothing going on, rather there is way too much.

Our indie horror flick Red Hook is coming along nicely, and we have engaged Quentin Chiapetta to compose the movie score, which is going to be amazing.

At the same time, I'm working with Red Hook's director, Elizabeth Lucas, to make a new Sci Fi feature, called Fade To White, which we've been filming in central park in the snow. Just beautiful.

So, in case you were worried, I haven't been sitting in bed eating bon bons.

A Moral and Intellectual Emergency

From Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris:

Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Hat tip to Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion is on my nightstand. (Sam's book was on my nightstand a few months ago, but I didn't notice this choice snippet then).

Interested in civic action for people whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements? Consider joining the Brights. I did.

Currency by the Yard

I was musing about this as I was reading about how naked Soci�t� G�n�rale must be feeling after having stripped off 7.5 yards of capital in (so it seems, but the night is young...) trader fraud.

I used to think that, when Wall Street Foreign Exchange traders sold Yen "by the yard" (meaning 10⁹ yen, a U.S. "billion"), I presumed that the New Yorkers were making a humorous and self-deprecating comparison between their business and the rag trade, next door on the Lower-East Side.

In fact, it is Londoners who invented it. They were abbreviating the word "milliard", the old French/British word for a 10⁹, when the word "billion" used to mean 10¹² (for which we say "trillion") following the numerical system known as �chelle longue. The word "billion" is still considered confusing semantically (did you mean 10⁹ or 10¹², old chap?), and phonologically is too close to million or trillion in a noisy trading environment, where people seem to be rather sensitive to silly mistakes.

I didn't know that.

Banking and Poverty

Sometimes I have to remind myself how poor people in the United States are:

In the middle of a Yahoo Finance article on Social Security, I notice:

As many as 40 million U.S. households either have no bank account or make little use of banking services, according to an estimate from the Chicago-based Center for Financial Services Innovation.

The current U.S. population is about 299,400,000 people (2006 est.), with about 2.59 persons per household. That means over 1 in 3 households don't use a bank. Wow.

But then, we note that over 1 in 8 people in the United States live in poverty (again, from the census), and over 1 in 5 children under age 5. Of course these stats are all over the place...

Travel Broadens

-Que me conseillez-vous d'aller visiter? demanda-t-il.
-La plan�te Terre, lui r�pondit le g�ographe. Elle a une bonne r�putation...

"내가 어떤 별을 가보면 좋을까요?" 그가 물었다.
"지구에 가봐. 지구는 평판이 좋거든." 지리학자가 대답했다.

"Kion vi konsilas, ke mi vizitu?" li demandis.
"La planedon Tero," respondis la geografo. "Ĝi ha- vas bonan reputacion..."

"What place would you advise me to visit now?" he asked.
"The planet Earth," replied the geographer. "It has a good reputation."

Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry

How much does a computer cost?

Is this right?

Item	Price	Per-day
The computer itself, is totally cool. You'll want to (or have to) replace it in five years.	$2,000.00	1.0958
Broadband - Road Runner	$50/month	1.6438
Online Backup - Carbonite	$4.95/month	0.1491
Virus Protection - McAfee	$40/year	0.1095
Total		$2.9982

Backup Your Home Computer. Please.

Goodness, where's my soap box. Even some of my tech savvy friends are leaving their home computers without backup. Then they have a computer or disk crash (or they lose their laptop), and their files are gone. Boom.

Is that you? Stop it! Right now!

As we put more and more of our "important papers" (financial papers, precious photos, personal phone books, e-mail, $10,000 worth of downloaded music, etc) onto our computers and nowhere else, leaving that at the mercy of a disk crash doesn't make any sense. I have a feeling my friends simply underestimate the frequency of hard disk failure, and the amount of insane trouble it causes when it happens.

The number of choices, though, actually discourages them from actually doing anything (the classic "too many brands of toothpaste" problem). So I thought I'd just cut through the clutter.

If you're on a PC, use Carbonite. You pay $49.95/year for unlimited storage.
If you're on a PC or Mac, use MozyHome. You pay $4.95/month for unlimited storage (discounts if you pay for one or two years in advance).

Both solutions are "set it and forget it". You download some software, it monitors your computer, backs up what has changed, gets out of the way when you're actually using your machine, encrypts your files for safety. (Note: I have no relationship with any of these companies, I just think they provide a decent service at a decent price).

I like the idea of "unlimited storage", because the moment you have to pick and choose what you back up to fit inside a fixed allotment, it's too much work, and you won't do it. (That's also why "I'll just e-mail my important files to my G-Mail account" doesn't work as a backup strategy: too much work, you just won't do it). Companies like ibackup.com are charging $100/year for 5Gb (and I don't like their software). Consider them "old school".

About security: both Carbonite and MozyHome encrypt the backups on your local computer, so they are safe in transit. However, they hold copies of the decryption keys, so you have to trust them (and their procedures for keeping those keys safe). So if you are paranoid, this may not be for you. File Backup has fixed allocations of storage at a reasonable price ($80/year for 10Gb, $180/year for 50Gb), and they assert that only the user has the private key (they do not have it). Think of it like the safety deposit box where you have the only key. Of course, if you lose it or forget it, goodbye data.

Food For Thought - Tzedakah

Not Funny

All my well meaning friends and relatives who send me funny stories, how do I tell them they are, um, not funny? Now research shows it is because they are egocentric. Duh. From the - New York Times:

In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.
One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.
We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail, the sender internally "hears" emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by the recipient.

My take is only slightly different - The problem with e-mail is that it lacks a prefrontal cortex to censor inappropriate impulsive behavior. I've decided to turn off the immediate send feature of my e-mail. I stack up all the e-mail I want to send, and then I push it all when I'm through. That gives me time, after hit "send", to go back, re-read, edit, delete, etc. I notice I almost always do so. The effort needed to read my own e-mail as my reader will read it is daunting, but when I do, I communicate more effectively. I'm just judging by results.

Interestingly, Tim Ferris suggested the same thing.

Reading What You Know

My friend Marc recommended that I take a look at The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. It is actually a fun read, mostly because Tim is crazy about living a good life, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

The topic is retirement, in a manner of speaking. There's a lot in common between his and my points of view, even though we are pretty different (think extroverted cage fighter vs introverted nerd "with excellent coping skills"). There's also common ground in the decisions we've made, including trading in a work-a-day life for mini-retirements and exciting projects.

When I stopped working my 9-to-5 job, the most interesting challenge was responding to every "so what do you do?". Tim's answer, "I'm a drug dealer" is quite inspired. At first, I wanted to just say, "I'm retired", just for its shock value. But it is not very satisfying. Now I usually end up with, "cool projects." And if they are still interested, I'll tell them about shooting a movie or raising money for NYFOS.

Truth be told, my interest in getting project teams to be more productive and reliable (and have more fun) is turning into a day job. The Celerity approach works quickly and effectively, and I'm partial to it. It uses a coaching model that works far better than any "drop off the book" or "teach the class" approach to organizing project teams that I've ever seen. It also allows me to make a huge difference in a small amount of time, something Ferris would appreciate.

The other book I read recently that touches on retirement and "lifestyle design" (unfortunate phrase) is Lee Eisenberg's The Number. It was a gift from my mom, and I've since given it to others. It starts off as if it wanted to talk to you about financial planning for your retirement, and quickly jettisons that for the more interesting question, "how do you step off the treadmill and figure out what you want to do with your life".