From Owen Barder’s blog…
I have just learned from DFID’s Chief Economist, Tony Venables, that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.
I’m baffled by all this enthusiasm for ethanol (not to mention BMW’s absurd obsession with hydrogen-fuelled limousines). A good rule of thumb is that if George W. Bush is keen on something, then it’s baloney. And he’s very keen on ethanol.
Well, perhaps not exactly. But see what Quentin’s up to.
It’s one of London’s iconic buildings, and a magnet for photographers (like my son, Brian, whose photograph this is), but there are rumours of a new attempt to replace it with a glass-walled monstrosity. Brian writes:
Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the new owners of the £400m prime 36+ acre riverside site, Treasury Holdings, had scrapped development plans approved by Wandsworth Council in November last year and speculated whether London might be about to lose the four iconic chimneys altogether to yet another bland, luxury, residential development if the Power Station is allowed to further deteriorate beyond the realms of renovation.
Wandsworth Council and previous owners, Parkview, refused to even consider an alternative report by a team of three companies of concrete experts brought together by the World Monuments Fund & Twentieth Century Society, who have revealed that the chimneys can be repaired for half the cost of demolition and rebuilding.
The independent report also revealed there is no sign of structural distress in the chimneys. When Parkview bought the site thirteen years ago, they promised to restore it, but instead sat on it and did nothing, merely hanging onto it as property speculators. They pushed through planning permission to demolish the chimneys, full of promises to restore the building, but instead immediately flogged it for a £240m profit, since the value of the site had increased hugely as a result of planning permission to demolish the chimneys. Profit not renovation was evidently their aim.’
There is a Number 10 e-petition that UK citizens can sign to put pressure on the developers to honour their agreement.
I’ve signed the petition. It reads:
‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the proposed demolition of the chimneys of Battersea Power Station and to legally oblige the current owners to renovate the site, rather than sit on it and speculate as the previous owners did.’
Invaluable tool when writing business plans. Find it here.
Denise Caruso has published an interesting book on the subject.
Hmmm… Interesting idea. More info here. On the drive home yesterday I listened to a Harvard Business School podcast in which one of the authors was interviewed. The official blurb reads:
Mark Twain once observed, “ A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—businessmen, educators, politicians, journalists, and others—struggle to make their ideas “stick.”
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.” Made to Stick describes the traits that link sticky ideas of all kinds, from urban legends to corporate mission statements to advertisements to proverbs.
Nice post — Is Twitter TOO good? — by Kathy Sierra. In her concluding para of a long and thoughtful post, she writes:
I am not in the target audience for Twitter–I am by nature a loner. I don’t want to be that connected. And I also have a huge appreciation for the art of keeping the mystery alive. I don’t want to know that much about so many people, and I sure don’t want people to know that much about me… mundane or otherwise. So, that puts me in the minority, and my Twitter fears are probably based solely on my own–quirky and less common–personality traits.
Lots more like you, Kathy.
Update… Disturbing news — Kathy has had death threats, and is understandably freaked by them. She pulled out of ETech (where she was due to give a presentation) as a result.
… is Envisioning Information. Kevin Kelly, never given to understatement, says of it:
“Keep this book with the few others that you’ll pass on to the next generation. It is a passionate, elegant revelation of how to render the 3 dimensions of experience into the 2 dimensions of paper and screen. As in his other books, Tufte is promoting a new standard of visual literacy. Immaculately printed in 23 colors, this book is a lyrical primer of design strategies for reading and creating messages in ‘flatland.’ No other book has been so highly recommended to us by so many different varieties of professionals — architects, teachers, technicians, hackers, and artists.”
From today’s edition of The Register…
Police are investigating the unexplained death of a man who appeared to commit suicide in front of an audience of webcam chatroom users.
Kevin Neil Whitrick, 42, from Wellington in Shropshire, was found at about 11.15pm on Wednesday by officers who went to his home following a report from a fellow chatroom user.
Resuscitation attempts failed, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. A post mortem was carried out on Friday morning, which confirmed the cause of death as hanging. A Coroner’s inquest will open on Monday.
Mr Whitrick was father to 12-year old twins. His ex-wife said he suffered a very serious car accident in July 2006, and had never fully recovered.
Lead investigator Detective Chief Inspector Jon Groves said: “Our enquiries to date have revealed that Mr Whitrick was using a chatroom with a number of other people at the time of his death.
“We are liaising with the internet service provider at this time to contact other users who were online at the time of this incident and who may have information that could assist our enquiries.”
Quentin pointed me to this post in The Dilbert Blog. It reads, in part:
One of the most potent forms of persuasion has to do with people’s innate need to be consistent. Studies show that people will ignore logic and information to be consistent. (In other words, we are moist robots.) According to the research, humans are hardwired for consistency over reason. You already knew that: People don’t switch political parties or religions easily. What you didn’t know is how quickly and easily a manipulator can lock someone into a position.
For example, researchers asked people to write essays in support of a random point of view they did not hold. Months later, when surveyed, the majority held the opinion they wrote about, regardless of the topic. Once a person commits an opinion to writing – even an opinion he does not hold – it soon becomes his actual opinion. Not every time, but MOST of the time. The people in these experiments weren’t exposed to new information before writing their contrived opinions. All they did was sit down and write an opinion they didn’t actually have, and months later it became their actual opinion. The experiment worked whether the volunteers were writing the pro or the con position on the random topic.
Most of the truly stupid things done in this world have to do with this consistency principle. For example, once you define yourself as a loyal citizen of Elbonia, you do whatever the King of Elbonia tells you to do, no matter how stupid that is. And your mind invents reasons as to why dying is a perfectly good life strategy.
Right on. I’ve always thought that consistency is a peurile obsession. Oscar Wilde described it as “the last refuge of the unimaginative”. When Maynard Keynes was once accused (I think by a journalist) of changing his mind, he replied, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
And one of the most nauseating aspects of modern British political journalism is the triumphant cry of “U Turn!” that goes up whenever a politician changes his or her mind. It seems to me that U-turns are a sure sign of a sentient, thinking being.
The Dilbert post attracted many idiotic comments, but one stood out from the crowd. It quoted this paragraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on Self reliance:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.