bookofjoe

Bringing in the new year with horses — by Verlyn Klinkenborg

His editorial page essay in today's New York Times described how he'll be bringing in the new year tonight: out in the pasture with his horses, who really don't have a clue about why tonight should be any different than every other night of their lives.

He wrote, "I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn't so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being."

The piece follows.

New Year’s Eve

At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.

There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.

It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.

It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.

I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.

I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.

Salt & Pepper Maracas

Wood handles and porcelain.

$20 CAD (click on "Kitchen and Tabletop," then scroll down).

Evan Williams and the 3 principles of innovation

1. "Genuinely new ideas are accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out"

2. "New ideas are by definition hard to explain to others"

3. "Good ideas seem obvious in retrospect"

These insights by Williams (above), the founder of Blogger and Twitter, appeared in the first paragraph of an excellent December 19, 2007 Economist story about him.

More: "Radical constraints can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things."

The article follows.

The Accidental Innovator

Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, epitomises Silicon Valley's right brain

At some point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights. First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect. So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious.

Of his previous successes, Blogger is today the best-known. It came about in the late 1990s when Mr Williams and his team struggled to build a complex software tool to let people collaborate. To keep each other abreast of the project, they kept a simple internal diary. Since that seemed to be the only thing working well, they joked that it, not the original project, should become their product. Thus was born Blogger, a web service that lets anybody create a blog with a few clicks. At the time, almost nobody understood what a blog was, or why anybody would want one. But in 2003 Google bought the company, and both blogs and Blogger are today part of the internet's mainstream.

By transferring to Google, however, Mr Williams, with his intuitive right-brain approach, was moving to Silicon Valley's analytical left brain. Shy and taciturn, he discreetly lets on that he hated every minute of his time at what was already an internet superpower in the making. Google trumpets its innovative nature, but its genius is for attacking known problems (web search, e-mail, calendars, etc) with brute force—weapons of mass computing and mathematical algorithms. Mr Williams's passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways. Google values official brains—the credentialled, academic sort—whereas Mr Williams dropped out of university in Nebraska because he found the concept somewhat silly. He left Google after less than a year.

His next idea, he now realises, was flawed by being obvious not in retrospect, but from the start—itself an important lesson. When podcasts emerged as the audio analogue of blogs, Mr Williams used his Google money to invest in a firm called Odeo that aimed to make listening to podcasts easier. Yet such a tool was so vital that Apple did the job with iTunes, its popular music-library software, thus eliminating the need for Odeo.

So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?

Thinking with the left brain, most reasonable people seem to agree that this idea is hare-brained, frivolous, banal and ridiculous. Indeed it is. And millions of people absolutely love it, twittering away throughout the day. Like all new and cool things, says Mr Williams, it's “experiential”. So it turns out that mums love to be notified on their mobile phones that their teenager is “eating an orange”. Colleagues appreciate that you are “running late” as they wait in the meeting room. Friends seeing that you are “having an espresso at Starbucks” might stop by. And a lot of people simply feel more connected by scavenging for conversational scraps from their friends.

All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question—one that Mr Williams is intellectually curious about, though it has not exactly been his main concern in the past. He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious (though they all sit in the same snazzy San Francisco loft), and is looking for new talent.

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software. He chooses still to be frustrated by it, saying that he would like to create some sort of “better to-do list”, a cross between a calendar, a wiki and other things. Ultimately, that is not the point, of course. The point is to try to do one thing, in the hope of losing discipline and focus at the first opportunity. “We have an itch that we scratch,” he says, “and that becomes the thing.” Silicon Valley is what it is because it has a few firms like Google—and lots of people like Evan Williams.

Gloves in a Bottle — Like Hope in a Jar, a catchy name — but where's the beef?

Constant readers will recall Episode 1 in this series, back on October 7, 2006.

They called theirs "Invisible Glove" and I remarked on the unfortunate choice of name when "Second Skin" was there for the taking.

No matter.

A year's passed and this crowd still hasn't caught on.

Me, I'm slow, but I eventually get there.

These companies might never arrive.

From the website:

Gloves in a Bottle

Unlike conventional moisturizers that attempt to replace the loss of natural moisture with artificial moisture, these invisible gloves help alleviate dry skin by preserving your body’s own moisture.

Recommended by dermatologists, Gloves in a Bottle bonds with the outer layer of your skin, creating a protective layer that helps retain skin’s natural moisture.

Greaseless, non-sticky, fragrance-free, hypoallergenic, non-toxic and undetectable when dry.

Does not wash off, but comes off naturally with exfoliated skin cells.

Works wonders on hands, feet, elbows, knees and heels.

Includes 8 oz. home size and 2 oz. travel size.

Reapply every 4 hours.

....................

$20.

Hope in a Jar

(1 oz.) is $28.

Note to proctologists-in-training: The drawing on Gloves in a Jar's bottle (top) should not be construed as a go-ahead to use the product in lieu of a latex or vinyl glove on your business hand.

Eeewwww — who said that?

Flautist?

Anyone?

Mark Frauenfelder riffs on Edwin H. Land's 'Solve the problem with what's in the room'

The editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine wrote the superb essay reproduced above for volume 12.

I cannot praise it highly enough.

Measuring Wheels

46 different distance measuring wheels, ranging in price from $31 to $168.

The longer the distance, the better one of these devices looks compared to the old tape measure.

[via Marshall of Kansas City (think Lawrence of Arabia)]

2007 Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill in Brockworth, Gloucestershire

In the event (above), which took place on May 28th of this year, a Double Gloucester cheese is rolled down the hill following which an "annual festival of nutters" throw themselves after it in hot pursuit with the winner getting the cheese.

Seems like the sort of thing Skipweasel'd be quite competitive at, don't you think?

Zami multi-cell inflatable travel pillow

That's different.

From the website:
....................

Zami™ Pillow

The Zami pillow is a revolutionary new multi-cell inflatable travel pillow

suitable for all your travel and leisure needs.

It's the only travel pillow you will ever need.

Use the Zami pillow while flying, boating, camping, taking a bath,

relaxing by the pool, in the car or just about anywhere.

The Zami pillow is lightweight, extremely durable and comes with a convenient carry bag.
....................

$24.95.