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MSI X340 two weeks later

alex — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:58:00 GMT

Ok, many reviewers have knocked the MSI X340’s keyboard, build quality, reflective screen, and touchpad. I still have some gripes with the touchpad, it is too sensitive and I have contorted my typing style to avoid touching it while typing. For those who don’t rest their wrists while they are typing will be fine, unfortunately that eliminates most people who use notebooks on their laps as their wrist are used to keep the notebook from falling off.

So for me I have to say that the slim for factor has really made the difference for me. I can now say I understand what the MacBook Air owners experience with their notebooks. For me I couldn’t justify the price tag for a MacBook Air but in the light of the recent price cuts, it is ever so more tempting.

The Core 2 Solo SU3500 processor coupled with a 2.5” SATA II 320GB hard disk has made the performance very respectable. For day to day use I have not seen a performance issue and it even beats our my two year old Core 2 Duo in perceived performance with a SATA I drive. I suspect that this is mainly due to the faster SATA II hard disk. It is also nice that it has an HDMI connector so I can connect directly to my TV to watch videos or share photographs that are on my PC.

The laptop has no issues with any video that I want to play, DIVX, XVID, h264 etc. Even my Canon 5D MK II HD video plays without any hiccups. (You need to use VLC or some other player other than Windows media player of course)

All in all I am happy with the weight and portability, it fits my needs and is very functional.

One final observation is I do wish the price was a little less (who doesn’t), especially with other vendors offering slightly heavier but more powerful configurations for less.

Sushi Hiro is My Hero

American Bloke — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:48:00 GMT

Finding good sushi in London is more of a challenge than I expected. (Finding good food in London is more of a challenge than I expected.) Overall I've been disappointed with Japanese food in London because I can't find soba noodles in dashi and it's difficult to find udon or ramen. Most of the sushi places I've encountered don't have specialty fish or cuts such as aji or ingawa or oh-toro. Also, you can forget getting things like maguro nato with a raw quail egg on top.

When it comes to sushi, most of the time it's overpriced and not always made by Japanese chefs. While neither are high quality, I find myself going to Wasabi and Itsu out of convenience. However the truth is I have some kind of moral problem with the amount of plastic wrap and garbage I produce when I eat at Wasabi. I also have a hard time with mass produced sushi because of my worry about overfishing tuna. Tuna fishing is one of my favorite hobbies when I'm in the US and even recreational fishing, which amounts to a fractional amount of the tuna harvested, is being heavely regulated by the reduction in the oceans tuna stock due to commerical fishing. To that end, I applaud the move Itsu has made recently to remove bluefin tuna from their menu though I think it's a bit silly that Pret A Manger has removed their tuna sandwich. Canned tuna usually comes from albacore which is much more abundant. So long story short... because of the quality and environmental factors amongst others I don't like to eat at places that mass produce sushi.

Back to the topic at hand, that is finding good sushi in London. One of my friends who lived in London for about 7 or 8 years had moved back to the NYC right before I moved to London. She gave me a list of restaurants and places to try. One of them was Sushi Hiro. I did some research of my own and as it turns out Sushi Hiro had plenty of recommendations from all over the web. It also appears on TimeOut's London's top 50 restaurants, London's best restaurants for dining alone, and London's best cheap eats lists. So, of course, I decided to give it a go.

Located right across from the Ealing Common Station in Zone 3, Sushi Hiro is a bit of a ride for me but no transfers necessary as it's on the District Line which I can pick up from my nearest tube station. It's a rather unassuming place. Not much in the way of decor neither outside nor inside. Plain white surroundings with the main stage being the sushi bar which looks pretty battle worn. Despite the rather cold decor, the mainly Japanese clientele that were around the evening that I was there all seemed to feel right at home.

You don't get a menu at Sushi Hiro but rather just a sheet with the fish of the day. You select the type of fish you want and the style ie nigiri sushi, sashimi, or hand roll or from their less than creative list of rolls. Nothing fancy to be seen here. I don't remember seeing anything in the way of hot dishes or soups other than of course miso soup. Clearly Sushi Hiro was all about the sushi. So sushi I had. Their list included the standard salmon, tuna, yellowtail, etc as well as some speciality fish such as aji, ingawa, and oh-toro. There were even items I've never seen or heard of before which is odd for me as I'm pretty experimental with my sushi.

The quality of the fish and the preparation were exquisite and the price very reasonable. The rolls could have been a bit more innovative but for the everyday roll they were quite good. I'd highly recommend Sushi Hiro and it's saved me from the otherwise poor sushi I've been having in London.

Reservations are a *must*. Trying to get a last minute reservation on a Sunday for even just one at the sushi bar can be a hassle. I've called up and failed twice now when I call at 2pm on the same day. So needless to say, it takes some forward planning.

The mission to find the best burritos in London - Take 1

American Bloke — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:35:00 GMT

For the past 15 months of my life I've been moaning and groaning about not being able to get decent Mexican food in London. Where was my Chipotle? Where was the El Torito? I wasn't asking for much! These are just chains for God's sake. It's not like I was looking for amazing mole or carne asada from the hole in the wall Mexicans joints the line many of the streets in the US serving up the best Mexican around. Where was even a decent plate of nachos? For the most part, getting nachos in London is like ordering a big bowl of soggy Doritos covered in sweet chutney-like salsa, horrible cheese, and cover with tons of sour cream. I just couldn't get it. Making decent nachos isn't rocket science but to the English maybe it is.

I've tried Chiquito in Leicester Square in my desperation for a good burrito on Cinco de Mayo. Maybe I should have know the place would be horrible because of it's tourist trap location. Maybe I should have known when the waiter didn't even realize it was Cinco de Mayo and they had nothing going on in the place to celebrate. Or maybe, I should have known because I'd been there a few months before and I didn't learn my lesson the first time. I had also been to Mestizo a had some success with their food but it was a sit-down and they didn't serve a decent burrito.

So this Saturday after having a strong craving for a burrito I went on a mission to find the best burritos I could in London. After some intense research, I had a list of several places to try. However I found that a few of them were food carts that only opened at lunch on weekdays. I quickly disqualified those and I decided on two places to try:

Both places have locations on Upper Street near Angel Station. Despite that their location is a bit out of the way for me, I decided I could hit two birds with one stone and make my way up there. I resolved to try them both back-to-back that day since I had little time to go back. They both serve up burritos in a Chipotle type manner. You select a burrito, fajita burrito, or a bowl. Then pick your beans, meat, and toppings. Either had barbacoa but each had a chicken, steak, and pork option. I stayed consistent with both of my orders getting the steak so I could do a comparison. Much the way I do at Chipotle, I got white rice, black beans, cheese, tomato salsa and the house's spiciest salsa, with guacamole on my steak burrito. Neither had an option of corn salsa which was somewhat disappointing. However, both had Cholula hot sauce on their table which I was happy to see. They both also sold beer. They offered similar seating with long, shared tables and some outdoor seating. Chilango also had upstairs seating and some stools by the window and was larger overall. As for decor, neither was over the top. Chilango was white with some floral patterns similar to the ones on their website but had an overall feel similar to a small Chipotle. Tortilla on the other hand was a bit darker with wooden tables.

First I went to Chilango. The steak was somewhat chewy. However, I had the last of their steak before they brought out the new batch. In fact, I almost went for the chicken instead due to the fact that I don't like getting the lasts of any of the meat at burrito places since you don't know how long it's been there. Aside from the chewiness the steak and overall burrito tasted quite good. They offered what appeared to be a tomatillo based hot sauce as opposed to a red hot sauce. I quite like salsa verde so that worked out for me. It also had a nice kick. With a bottle of water, my total was approximately £7.

Tortilla gives you a choice of small or large burritos which was kind of nice especially after having a Chilango just minutes before. I generally find that Chipotle's burritos are sometimes too big so having the option for large or small isn't just for days when you have two burrito lunches. They also offered white or yellow rice. Tortilla's hot salsa was a red chilli based salsa but wasn't too spicy. Although they offer freshly cut jalapenos as an optional topping, I found them to be rather mild. Tortilla wraps their burritos kind of like a tube where they are flattened at both ends which I found interesting. For my small burrito, I paid about £5.50. As an aside, Tortilla sold Cholula bottles if you wanted to pick some up though for nearly a whooping £4. Much better off going to Whole Foods on High Street Kensington where I believe it's also sold.

Overall: I was actually pleased with both and I'm happy to say I can no longer make the statement that you can't get a good burrito in London. While I think it's mainly a matter of taste, I think Chilango is the clear winner in my opinion. It was their cilantro rice and better guacamole that I think pushed them over the top. That being said if I didn't know about Chilango I still would have been pleased with Tortilla.

I'm going to continue on my search for the best burrito in London however I think the mission is already accomplished....

Be warned: I like my food very spicy so proceed with caution.

Disappointed in a "promotion" of sorts

American Bloke — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:58:00 GMT

So like I said my first post is about office politics and not about the food and drink I plan to mainly focus on. In this cause, however, I just simply need to vent. I've been for all intents and purposes promoted at work today. Apparently it was decided last Thursday but I only found out today. Instead of being overjoyed, I'm frankly disappointed, nervous, and down right frustrated. Now I don't mean to be a whiner about something good happening to me but I think maybe this will shed some light on the situation:

I work in IT on a agile project. We employ a development approach called Scrum and until this point I've been a Java lead. I was pretty proud of that fact since I've only really been doing Java development for the past 9 months. All my prior work experience was in C# to that point and, while they are similar, I was picked out of a lot of talented Java developers with many years of experience. I think that there are many reasons I got selected as a Java lead, some because I proved myself to be capable and some that were purely political. Nonetheless, I took on the role about 3 months after picking up Java and with good success. I credit much of that success to the talented team that worked with me. So, life was good. I was learning a lot and felt things were going in the right direction.

Now to give you some needed background on our project team structure, developers report to a development lead, in my case Java lead, who report to a Scrum Master who reports to the senior management committee. The team size overall is large, so despite this being overly hierarchical, it works for us. Today, I got told by my Scrum Master that decision was made by senior management that I was now the Scrum Master and he was now reporting to me. Came somewhat out of left field. While this is a "promotion" to a certain degree, I couldn't help but feel like:

The decision was unwarranted as he was doing a good job
It was silly to remove a senior person and replace him with a new relatively new and unproven Java developer
Comments I made to management about issues on the team were manipulated to push him out rather than fixing the process which was the true problem
Some of this had to do with bad management overall

I'm happy enough to be promoted due to my accomplishments and even happy enough to accept a promotion due to political reasons. However, a promotion due to dirty politics and ill contrived notions of how development should work truly disappoints me. It all seems like a cover up by an project manager who found himself pushed into a corner.

This isn't the first time this particular project manager has done tried to place blame on others therefore getting them demoted so I can only anticipate that he tries to do the same with me when he gets into another bind. Unfortunately for him, I have a different policial and organizational role than the other guys he's pushed aside in the past. It won't be as easy with me and I hope he recognizes that. I have more to lose than the guys before me so, though I'd rather not have to fight, I'd have no choice. Let's hope it doesn't come down to that.

Introduction to my blog and to me (kind of)

American Bloke — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:04:00 GMT

So after a long hiatus from the blog world, I decided to start blogging again. I had moved to London from New York and so much of what I saw intrigued me. Some pissed me off, some made me laugh, and much of it just didn't compute. In many ways, despite the fact that we spoke the same language, there was a massive divide in communication between many of the people who lived here and me. I felt a need to chronicle my thoughts and experiences and so I asked Tim if he would be so kind as to host a blog for me on /*. Seemed like there is no better place for my comments than a place named /*. So about 15 months after the fact, I'm finally posting my first entry.

First, why it too me so long to write my first post is a long story. Let's just say last year was one of the most bizarre years of my life. Maybe I'll have time for the sob story later but to cut the the chase in many ways I'm happy I had some time to absorb London before writing anything. While it would have been good to see how my perspective has evolved over the past 15 months I've been here, much of what I thought about things earlier has changed. Not to mention, I probably would have pissed people off with some of my earlier opinions on life here.

That being said, the purpose of this blog is not to keep from pissing people off. In fact, you'll find that a good percentage of my posts will be opinionated and unapologetically so. But most good blogs are. Instead of these opinions being about society, people, and the day-to-day grind of London, I'm going to focus on restaurants, bars, and travel. I also don't really intend on using this blog as a place for my work focused ideas, etc. However, I reserve every right to speak on anything I feel like. Opinions on things in general will pop into the mix and, in fact, my first post after this will be about office politics. At the moment, I plan on these types of posts being the outliers and not the norm but this blog, like my thoughts on London, may evolve.

As you may have noticed from the /* comments remark earlier, I'm an IT guy. (For you non-IT folk look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#Programming). I have been traveling around the Europe quite a bit during my stay and tonight makes only the 3 night I've cooked at home since I've moved here. That means I do a lot of eating out, going out to bars, and the visiting of a lot of different places. I'm hoping this blog motivates me to do more of that so I have material to report back on. My friends have always said I should be a food critic so maybe this is my chance to do that as well. I genuinely hope people enjoy reading the content I write and that it makes their experiences at the restaurants, bars, and cities in Europe better. So I can be as subjective and opinionated as I want without any repercussions, I'm going to stay relatively vague beyond that about who I am.

So with that, welcome to my blog and I hope to make you a regular reader.

Anti-Glare Screens / Screen Protectors

alex — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:03:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my previous posting about the MSI X340 the screen is highly reflective, so much so that you will never use it in an outdoor environment.

With that said, I have been using a screen protector for my Toshiba M400. Now on the M400 the screen protector is a little annoying since it does cut some of the brightness, but this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem on the X340, even at the lowest brightness setting.

I will post a picture of my screen installation later but for now I just ordered a screen that is slightly larger in length and width of the X340’s screen and I trimmed the protector to fit. Now I can see the screen with a bright background and reflection isn’t as distracting…

When you order the screen you should find one that is 1/4 inch wider/longer that the visible portion of the screen. The screen protector is attached using low-tack double sided tape. In any case wander over to www.strongengineering.com to take a look.

-Alex

MSI X340 Touchpad Driver

alex — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:01:00 GMT

One of the most talked about things on the MSI forums is the lack of drivers for the Sentelic touchpad. Someone even went to the extreme of replacing the touchpad with the Synaptics equivalent. The main issues with the Sentelic touchpad are:

MSI doesn’t provide drivers
Sentelic cannot use the familiar scroll to the left and right like the Synaptics touchpad, instead it just uses a prolonged click gesture to scroll up and down, which is not the same experience as sliding your finger up and down.
Multi-touch is the future, why don’t you include a multi-touchpad?

In any case the MSI X340 uses the Sentelic touchpad. As you can see from the MSI driver download site, the drivers are missing. So what are we to do? Google is your friend here…I think I downloaded the file from one of the links on this forum post.

The driver works just fine under Windows 7 RC (7100). Also you might want to download the System Control Manager from the MSI driver site.

MSI x340

alex — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:46:00 GMT

The MacBook Air and the Lenovo x301 have really put ultra-thin notebooks in the lime light.

Unfortunately due to the price and the economic climate, the new media favorite are the low cost/light weight/and long life netbooks.

(Netbooks typically have a low powered processor, have a 10” screen or smaller, 1GB to 2GB of RAM, No Optical Drive and cost less than $500)

MSI has broken the trend of both netbooks and ultra expensive ultra-thin notebooks with their X series. (X320, X340, X600)

Both the X320 and the X340 share the same thin chassis similar in size and weight to the MacBook Air, except that the X320 uses a netbook class processor and the X340 is using a Core 2 Solo 1.4GHz processor. The X600 is a 15.6” ultra-thin notebook.

Laptop Magazine has a MacBook Air vs. X340 comparison article. They also did a very nice review of the X340.

For me the most important characteristics for a new notebook was (1) Size and (2) Multimedia (HD) capability. I have other 4+ pound laptops with Intel Core 2 Duo processors so I don’t necessarily need power.

Just as I received the X340, DELL had released their Studio 14z which trumps the X340 in specs, NVidia GeForce 9400M graphics, Core 2 Duo processors,and 3-5 GB RAM for just around the same price albeit adding a pound and a half of weight.

Later this summer, Lenovo will release their S12 (NVidia ION platform) and U350 which will make the choice to buy the MSI X340 even harder.

Overall I agree with all the points from Laptop Mag…

The keyboard is mushy and flexes too much.
The screen is pretty bright and has good contrast but is suffers from some poor viewing angles from above and below. Side to side angles seem to be ok.
The labeling of the Fn icons is weird, it took me a while to figure out why the WiFi wasn’t working. (Had to refer to the manual)
I don’t like the glowing MSI logo on the back of the screen
The screen is very reflective. So it may not do very well in bright areas
I would never drop this notebook. It may not survive.
HD video plays well with Windows Media Player
Canon 5D MKII H.264 video still needs to be played in VLC on Windows 7 RC
2-3 hour HD video playback is good
8 cell battery should provide even longer life (Hopefully it will be released soon)

If you need something with more kick than a NetBook and don’t want to shell out for a MacBook Air, Dell Adamo, or Thinkpad X301 then the MSI X340 is for you today. If you can wait until August then I think the Lenovo U350 may be a better buy and from the looks of it better build quality.

For me this will be great to entertain the kids on trips and it will be light enough to carry back and forth to work.

Weekend Reading #5

Tim — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:36:29 GMT

It's a big one today as I'm still getting caught up on a backlog from my treatment weeks.

General/Business:

Startup:

Technical:

TIVO HD issues on Verizon FIOS - Resolved

alex — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

After getting FIOS for my Internet and TV, I have nothing to say nothing but good things. There was big issue issue with pixilation. Since I used to have DirectTV I was used to some pixilation due to a storm, or something flying in front of the dish, but for FIOS, this was an un welcome problem.

It took me a little time to speak to an support representative to get someone to come out and take a look. But when the technician was out what he told me was interesting. Verizon was pushing too much signal through the wires in my house. I previously had ComCast internet and we had to run a direct homerun cable to the point on entry so that I had enough signal for a reasonable connection. Go figure.

In any case the tech installed an 6db attenuator on both my TIVO boxes and HD is not giving me any more issues.

How should I backup my data?

alex — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:29:20 GMT

We currently live in a world where our digital assets are just as important as our physical ones.

I know many people struggle with how to persist their data, beyond the life of their computer or storage device.

Alas there is no easy single device solution but there are ways to do this reliably without breaking the bank and most importantly, not losing all your data.

I am a firm believer in replicating your data so that it never sits on one physical piece of hardware or in even one location. If you keep in mind having a copy of your data on different pieces of hardware and different machines and locations, you will never lose data.

A general rule of thumb is that for every 1GB of data you need about 4GB-6GB of RAW data to protect it with my solution, distributed across machines of course. Remember, don’t put all your storage eggs in one basket. If you by 4GB of storage, it is better to buy 2 2TB enclosures and place them on different machines.

What are the backup options out there…

While all these options are nice, NOT one can be used alone and are not a complete solution. Why you may ask, isn’t this harsh?

Every device will fail, end of story. The enclosure could fail, the drive could fail, and worse two drives can fail while you are recovering a drive. This will result in a complete loss of data and thousands of dollars to one of the online companies like Drive Savers or Ontrack.

Why just mirroring (RAID1) why not RAID 5, 6, or the custom RAID protocols used in Drobo or Raid-X?

Well mirroring is just plain simple. There is no underlying complexity for the mirror. What you write is just written in two places.
The drives can operate independently if broken from the RAID1 array and placed in an external enclosure or different machine.
The argument that you can’t expand the RAID volume is true but do you really need to do it? If you want a larger volume, just go out and buy another enclosure with 2 larger mirrored drives and copy the data. How difficult is that. The up side is that you get newer drives (less likely to fail, probably faster) and a newer enclosure (less likely to fail).

TIP: If you have a large amount of data, you should organize it on volumes in the order of importance. There is no reason to replicate ISO images of DVDs that you have the physical media for. Also you should use eSATA enclosures for maximum performance. Finally if you really need more performance that RAID1 doesn’t offer, think of RAID10.

Finally, some people like DVD or Blue-Ray media backup. In my mind, it is dead. It takes too long to backup, it is too expensive compared to a hard disk based backup.

Here is my current solution:

All PCs sync to one main machine (multiple copies of data reside on multiple physical machines)

Use an automated program like Windows Live Sync to sync your data between machines automatically. I stress automatically since you will never remember to run the script
All PCs with the exception of the Laptop have RAID mirrors for important data. I prefer to use external drive mirrors (both Western Digital and LaCie provide units that I use, that are reasonably priced. I have thought about Drobos but I will wait until they support eSATA) (multiple copies of your data on different disks on the same machine, will survive single disk failure)
Run a backup program to backup to an External Disk AND also to the Cloud. If you can remember to take the backup disk to your safety deposit box every few months and swap it for a new one then you can skip the cloud backup. For me I will never remember.
(it is always a good idea to have a copy of the data that can survive a worm or a surge. my backup drive is not always live, I only plug it in to do backups.)

Entrepreneurship, Ambiguity and Risk

Tim — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:06:00 GMT

It's now been a little more than a year since I left Goldman Sachs to work on Notches full-time. Initially, many of my family and friends talked about how impressed they were about me taking such a "risk". In fact, that's the thing that scares most people out of starting their own business – they just consider it too "risky" to be out there on their own.

I always said that what I'm doing really isn't all that risky, since I had just finished my law degree and leaving Goldman was an inevitability. The big question was whether I would try to follow the well-worn legal career path: join a law firm, bill a lot of hours and eventually make partner or try to become in-house counsel somewhere.

Ultimately, I wanted to forge my own path. I decided to start my own business because I felt it gave me an opportunity to put my technical, legal and business skills and creativity to work in a way that I could create value, in a way that was appreciated instead of marginalized. Building something of your own is certainly rewarding, but I think what really appealed to me were the possibilities.

In other words, there was no road map. There was no set path – entrepreneurship is, by definition, creating something new. It was these possibilities that I did not see at Goldman or in a legal career that really rang out to me.

As Reid Hoffman put it, in the current economy and job market, we're all entrepreneurs now – but that isn't always true especially within larger organizations.

Jim Collins (of Built to Last and Good to Great fame) made this point very well in a recent Inc. interview.

How do you define entrepreneurship?

I take a broad view of it. The traditional definition -- founding an entity designed to make money -- is too narrow for me. I see entrepreneurship as more of a life concept. We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can take a paint-by-numbers approach, or you can start with a blank canvas. When you paint by numbers, the end result is guaranteed. You know what it's going to be, and it might be good, but it will never be a masterpiece. Starting with a blank canvas is the only way to get a masterpiece, but you could also blow up. So, are you going to pick the paint-by-numbers kit or the blank canvas?

It has to do with your ability to handle risk, no?

Not risk. Ambiguity. People confuse the two. My students used to come to me at Stanford and say, "I'd really like to do something on my own, but I'm just not ready to take that much risk. So I took the job with IBM." And I would say, "You're not ready for risk? What's the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. You've just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else." As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else's company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don't exist. You just can't see them, and so you can't manage them. That's a much more exposed position than the entrepreneur faces. But there's lower ambiguity on the paint-by-numbers path: very clear but more risky. The entrepreneurial path: very ambiguous but less risk. Of course, the truth is that it's all ambiguous, anyway. If you think you can predict the future, you're crazy.

This distinction between ambiguity and risk is an important one. Starting a capital-efficient technical business wasn't really risky, in the sense the sense that I really stand to lose anything. Mostly, it comes down to opportunity cost and even there it's not clear I really lost anything. Though I do not collect a salary, we have adjusted our lifestyle accordingly, have a very low cost basis, and saved for this upfront. On one hand, I could have made, say, $150,000 if I joined a law firm in NYC as a first-year associate. On the other, I have gained experience and knowledge and had leadership opportunities I would have never had at a law firm or at Goldman. Ultimately, I have to believe that I will have even better opportunities available to me now that may be worth well-more I have opportunities available now that I never would have had last year.

Whether or not Notches is ultimately successful, it has certainly taught me that I'm happier when I follow an entrepreneurial path – not because of the risk but because of the ambiguity. I relish the ambiguity, because the ambiguity is what brings possibility.

The Crash-Test Solution: Using physics to predict economic downturn

Tim — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:18:17 GMT

There's a really interesting article in the latest issue of Portfolio that suggests that the latest economic downturn wasn't an unpredictable black swan – but rather that we're using the wrong tools (and wrong people) to try to detect it.

A small but growing cadre of scientists are arguing that our current crisis was in fact predictable and that the technology exists to make sure that it won’t happen again. The problem may be that we’ve used only economists to try to solve our economic predicaments. Instead, the solution may be found by physicists and other scientists accustomed to studying complex systems.

To anticipate the next crisis and find our way out of this one, we may have to cast off economic and financial dogma and adopt ideas inspired by physics and other natural sciences, disciplines in which the notion of unstable and unpredictable systems is nothing new. For instance, the technology now exists to go beyond economics to build a massive, complete computer model of the modern economy, from the corner store to the city bank and the Federal Reserve.

With such a model, physicists would be able to track changes in the economy dynamically. There have even been calls for an ambitious effort akin to the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, to bring the most sophisticated mathematics and computer modeling to bear on managing the world’s economies more aggressively than has ever been attempted.

It's clear that our economic woes are in part because of increasingly complex and intertwined. Bailouts are necessary simply because the death of a single (even small) corporation (which is what I and most other "true capitalists" might prefer) can have a dramatic ripple effect on the rest of the ecosystem.

On that note, I can't think of a system more complex and intertwined than nature; it will be interesting to see how science can be applied to this other "unpredictable and complex" system.

Weekend Reading #4

Tim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:59:00 GMT

Startup:

Technical:

Weekend Reading #3

Tim — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:29:00 GMT

General/Business

IntenseDebate Plugins: Blog Comments as a Platform - building an ecosystem around their own JScript plugin
Reid Hoffman Tells Charlie Rose: “Every Individual Is Now An Entrepreneur.”
Doctor's Orders: Don't Review Me Online
Framing Facebook's Growth
Writing Decisions: Saving space without losing meaning
A signature cadence

Startup

Technical