Tim Molendijk

Ever have the feeling that science is sort of ‘finished’? This is a nice indication of how little we know:

Quantum mechanics and relativity, our two best theories of how the world works, seem strangely at odds with the world as we experience it - and with each other

From Gravity mysteries: Will we ever have a quantum theory of gravity?

To discover what comes next, maybe we should look upwards. Skylines provide the simplest test of what a society values, and where its surpluses are controlled. A few centuries ago the greatest buildings in the world’s cities were forts, churches and temples; then for a time they became palaces. Briefly in the 19th century civic buildings, railway stations and museums overshadowed them. And then in the late 20th century everywhere they were banks. Few believe that they will be for much longer. But what will come next—great leisure palaces and sports stadiums; universities and art galleries; water towers and hanging gardens; or perhaps biotech empires? We need to rekindle our capacity to imagine, and to see through the still-gathering storm to what lies beyond.

From After capitalism by Geoff Mulgan in Prospect Magazine.

Part of what happened over the last 15, 20 years is that so much money was made in finance, that about 40% — I think — of our overall economic growth was in the financial sector. Well, now what we’re finding out is; a lot of that growth wasn’t real. It was paper money, paper profits on the books, but it could be easily wiped out. And what we need is a steady growth. We need young people, instead of [mumbles] a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide they wanna be an engineer, they wanna be a scientist, they wanna be a doctor or a teacher. And if we’re rewarding those kinds of things that actually contribute to making things and making people’s lives better, that’s gonna put our economy on solid footing. We won’t have this kind of bubble and bust economy that we’ve gotten so caught up in for the last several years.

Barack Obama on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno of March 19 of this year. Click here to see the video, quote starts at around 3:53.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Google Street View has been released in The Netherlands. Or, at least some parts of it, including Amsterdam. Like anyone the first I did was checking out my home and my office (and the redlight district).

Turns out my bicycle is at two places at the same time.

Grotere kaart weergeven

Grotere kaart weergeven

There is no rational way to value an early stage startup. The valuation reflects nothing more than the strength of the company’s bargaining position.

From How to Be an Angel Investor by Paul Graham, who is definitely one of my favorite authors. His writing is like good code: well structured, clear, concise, sober and effective.

From A conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google by Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose:
I have a question.
[laughter]
It is this notion of — I was just thinking about this. Technology — are people in technology different?
[laughter]

Eric Schmidt:
Yes.

Charlie Rose:
They are? What is it?

Eric Schmidt:
Technologists as a group tend to be more analytical, more data driven, more personally liberal, more willing to tolerate the differences among people.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Eric Schmidt:
More global in their focus. And I think that’s across all political parties. People in technology believe that you can create whole new businesses. In my dealings with other businesses, they often seem to be locked in a paradigm that was given to them by their grandfather. You know, this is the economic structure. This is the industrial structure. This is how it’s always been done. Technology as a group, believe that you can literally change the world from technology.

Transcript by TechCrunch.

Paul Graham gives an intelligent analysis of why diplomas matter less than they used to, why they will even matter less in the coming future, and why this is a good thing. I could not agree more.

Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. But by no means a perfect solution. When you judge people that way, you tend to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day South Korea.

What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next.

(…)

Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.

So why did they even evolve? Why haven’t we just been measuring actual performance? Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. Individual performance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the harder performance is to measure, the more important it is to predict it. If an organization could immediately and cheaply measure the performance of recruits, they wouldn’t need to examine their credentials. They could take everyone and keep just the good ones.

(…)

Credentials are a step beyond bribery and influence. But they’re not the final step. There’s an even better way to block the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.

(…)

The era of credentials began to end when the power of large organizations peaked in the late twentieth century. Now we seem to be entering a new era based on measurement. The reason the new model has advanced so rapidly is that it works so much better. It shows no sign of slowing.

The full essay can be found here.

Thursday February 26 I attended a Python Users meeting in Arnhem. Just like a couple of months ago in Amsterdam we had a nice turnout and some interesting topics on the agenda.

First there was Christo Butcher telling us something about his open source speech recognition framework Dragonfly. He astounded us all by stating that he actually does all of his Python programming by speech, something I still find hard to visualize. Hopefully he will be able to give a short demo at a future meet-up.

Then it was my turn to tell something about my latest endeavor for my business software company SmartPR: Python web app deployment. A month or so ago I sent out an e-mail to the python-nl mailing list asking for some advice. Eventually I ended up going the zc.buildout route, which is a very elegant system that utilizes setuptools to streamline, automate and isolate deployments. zc.buildout’s biggest problem is its somewhat arcane nature, having its roots in the not-so-newcomer-friendly Zope world. The goal I had with my speech was to take away some of the fear that many people (including myself) have when considering the package. As there is not much introductory documentation available on the subject, it can be hard to find assurance that zc.buildout is the right tool for your job. After I had shared my experiences with the group we had a nice little discussion which ended in the conclusion that zc.buildout is a terrific tool that is in desperate need of some decent documentation. Some people expressed their willingness to do something about this problem, which is an initiative I will support as soon as it comes. In the meantime I intend to report some of my work with zc.buildout here on this blog, since there is really just a handful of tutorial-style articles available online. For now I will just point to the buildout configuration that I currently use for deploying SmartPR. That will probably already be a very useful resource for the truly interested.

Before I end this post, let me thank Erwin Elling and Salmon Tetelepta at Eight Media and David Hund at Valued Standards for hosting us in their great office building. And of course Floris van Manen for giving me a ride back home . As always Reinout van Rees put a nice summary of the night on his blog. The next PUN meet-up will be on May 28 at Seek You Too in Veenendaal. See you guys there!

UPDATE: Erwin posted a brief review on the Eight Media blog, including a gorgeous photo of my scribbly presentation sketches.

As far as marketing is concerned, authenticity is the new black. But what exactly is authenticity? Why are some people perceived as authentic, while others aren’t? Many of us would answer these questions with variations on “being true to oneself” or “not pretending to be someone else”. Seth Godin takes an interesting and slightly different approach:

Authenticity, for me, is doing what you promise, not “being who you are”.

That’s because ‘being’ is too amorphous and we are notoriously bad at judging that. Internal vision is always blurry. Doing, on the other hand, is an act that can be seen by all.