The Paradox of Choice is a book with a thesis that's stuck in my head since I read about it a few years back. Simply put, more choice doesn't necessarily make us happier. The video and book gives some hard-to-dispute examples and data to back this up.
The thought that chases me is how much of technological progress is done in pursuit of choice/options/etc, without, as the book makes clear, accounting for the aggregate tragedy-of-the-commons cost of these options. The paradox is that someone somewhere will benefit (immensely?) from the choices technology produces, and there's no easy way to say when enough is enough.
Should we go back to 4-5 channels of TV? Laughable, right? Is it possible we'd be happier if we did? Hmmmm. That's just one way the book starts messing with your head.
The book repeats the central idea many times ... it's a simple enough that you get it well before the end, but I still found it worthwhile to ponder for the duration of the book. I would suggest that you pick up a copy, but that would only be adding to your reading choices (see how evil it is?)
Hey John, this sounds good. For dvds, cds and paperbacks, zunafish.com works well (albeit not quite so karmic). For $1 plus $2 postage, the site sets up swaps. I own about 20 dvds, and I gradually swap them after I watch them, so that about 3/4 are ones I haven't seen. It's like netflix, with a bit less choice online but more DVDs at home and no fixed fees. Now if I could only acquire the time to watch everything I'd like to watch... #
I like the idea ... after getting over the initial Netflix rush during which the near-infinite film choice collided with finite movie watching time, I opted out and tried dvdswap.com. The experiment didn't last long, mainly because I had a big problem with liquidity. At the time, there just weren't enough swaps to be had. Now I just buy on half.com and resell on ebay. The buy/sell spread is usually about $4/movie (includes postage), which is the price I pay at my local video store, except no late fees, costs you nothing if you can't get to it, and no monthly commitment. I use Half.com because bidding on ebay is too much work and the selection of used inventory is pretty good.
Anyway, Bookmooch is incredibly liquid - I think the inventory is > 2 Million books and growing very rapidly. I think 'bigger than amazon' is definitely a possibility.
4:46:58 PM comment []trackback []
I'm enjoying the bookmooch service quite a bit. It's kind of an honor system based inter-library loan, except you aren't loaning books, you own them free and clear. And it's not between libraries, but individuals. But other than that, it's exactly like inter-library loan. :-)
Here's how it works: You put in a list of books gathering dust on your shelf, and a list of books you'd like to read. When there's a match between have's and want's, bookmooch shoots you an email to send or receive the book. You pay postage on outgoing, but the incoming books are free.
It's a treat to have a free book show up in your mailbox ... netflix has that same psychological edge over the local video store, except in the case of netflix they only want you to think it's free.
They keep an upload/download ratio just like the BBS's of yore, but I haven't quite figured out the reputation mgmt system yet. I do know, however, that you can donate your accrued book-donating karma to hospitals so they can get more book donations for patients. How cool is that?
So far I've sent 8 and received three, and I recommend the service to everyone I get within earshot (apologies to friends). Give it a shot.
4:24:43 PM comment []trackback []
My friend Andy launched a startup about 6 months ago, and has been getting lots of press in the last week. He's a bike nut, so that's always what we talk about when I see him : the crazy cost of the big dig and the missed opportunity for public transit, the cities without cars exhibit at the MIT Museum, Boston's legendary bike-unfriendliness, wouldn't it be great to work as a bike messenger instead of behind a desk, yada yada. He decided to make a business from his passion for bikes, and launched the New Amsterdam Project, a bicycle delivery service.
I confess that I was skeptical about the business plan when he described it to me a year ago or so. Somehow I thought he would be doing food delivery with bike messenger overhead ( the bastard son of Kozmo and Webvan perhaps? ). But I'm glad to see that's completely wrong.
It clicked for me when Andy mentioned, "We're really a trucking company" and described some of his first customers: delivering local produce to restaurants and farm-share subscribers. It's all scheduled recurring delivers, mostly business-to-business. He replaces trucks with bikes - as simple as that.
Anyway, I get it now. The zero-carbon-footprint approach to deliveries, making local produce workable, taking cars/trucks off the streets -- it's all incredibly timely with gasoline breaking the $4/gal limit. The MSM has picked up on it : he was on NPR Morning Edition last week and one or more 24 hour cable news networks sometime in the next week or so. And with every media mention, more businesses realize they can somewhat painlessly redirect necessary and frequent spending in an environmentally friendly way.
I believe we can make cities look very different than they do now, and make them work better for the cars and people whose coexistence is quite strained. Some of the change will be driven by technology, but a lot can happen with old-school determination and guts. Andy has the latter, and I wish him luck.
LINQ - I wrote my first LINQ query last week. My normal web app works with heterogeneous data sources ( xml/object/sql ), and I *know* I'm going to love moving up the LINQ learning curve. This is a no-brainer, but it's going to take a long time before clients are ready to move from .NET 2.0, so I'm grateful for any chance I get to obtain LINQ-fu
LogParser - a command line tool with knowledge of various log formats, supporting a sql dialect. The size and scope of the tool might tempt you to pass for something simpler: don't. Think of it as LINQ for logs, packaged into a neat executable.
Powershell - I love reducing data integration challenges to a batch script. It makes it so much easier to troubleshoot when moving scripts around between environments ( big tools and compiled code have their place, but they tend to be the enemy of getting done on time.) I've done a ton of vbscript/jscript and plain old DOS batch scripting, and occasionally I've had to resort to activeperl. But now it's time to retire all of these approaches.
Powershell's pipeline has thoroughly baked into it my favorite perl idioms : map and grep, but these are now object-aware, shell,file system, Win32 and CLR integrated. It is fantastic.
There's a fourth cool thing that kind of belongs on the list above, but it's only CTP right now:
I tried out the Windows version of the original memcached for a client recently, and it's one of the only server-based pieces of software I can recall where deployment of the software took less time than deployment of the virtual machine:
Unzip, double click ... deployed.
Copy/paste, have ASP.NET code writing to a pool of 2 memcached instances.
After Velocity gets through paying the Microsoft tax, supporting integrated authentication/ad, Live Mesh/Sync Framework, MS Cluster, dcom/XA transactions, etc will it still be MS's answer to memcached? Or just another reason to use memcached?
google-jstemplate has been open sourced. (The link points to a slideshow-overview containing the quote above).
I've been pushing much more typically-server-side functionality down to the client, but am finding a wall at some point when things like performance etc come into play. When this happens, I move the functionality back to the server (5 lines of jquery becomes 30 lines of perl or 100 lines of C#) where I have more control and predictability with things like caching/dom parsing/same-origin-policy etc.
I am very interested in learning from the google folks who normally blow through this wall on a regular basis.
see also Jemplate for client side templating coolness.
From the most recent Jemplate changelog:
---
version: 0.21
date: Mon Apr 28 12:44:13 CST 2008
changes:
- Robert Krimen provided massive improvements including:
- jQuery support
- YUI support
- Many new command line options for fine grained control
- Doc changes
- Much refactoring
- Ingy added:
- A standalone Jemplate compiler (bin/jemplate)
- Some doc: (bin/README)
I saw some married people in the cafe the other day and something
seemed wrong. They weren't passionate. I have a unique perspective
on human relations, having been an eligible bachelor and active user
of various dating websites since the category's inception over 10
years ago. Long term monogamous relationships are especially hard on
people. Relationships are passionate early on, so why bother having
one for longer than that?
Structurally, long term relationships often lead to kids. Kids are
complex. And difficult to fund. Funding them with credit cards is
stupid. For both reasons long term relationships should be avoided.
Now, it's not your partner's fault. I saw lions and monkeys in Africa
one time. Monkeys don't get married, and neither do lions. They're
both happy, so people shouldn't either.
Also, nonmonogamy is definitely something that can be learned. At
AshleyMadison.com, we help married people come out of their shells and
find other people willing to overcome the straight-jacket of the
married/long term monogamous life.
Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that
convinces me that being non-monogamous, at least in a small group, is
the natural way for people to live.
Watching previously faithful, married, and, frankly dull people get
transformed into passion-filled 'players' makes it clear that the
difference between the two is due mostly to environment — and in
particular that the environment in long-term relationships is toxic to
people.
In the first couple weeks of working on their first affair they seem
to come to life, because finally they're living hedonistically the way
people are meant to.
My friend Andy launched a startup about 6 months ago, and has been getting lots of press in the last week. He's a bike nut, so that's always what we talk about when I see him : the crazy cost of the big dig and the missed opportunity for public transit, the cities without cars exhibit at the MIT Museum, Boston's legendary bike-unfriendliness, wouldn't it be great to work as a bike messenger instead of behind a desk, yada yada. He decided to make a business from his passion for bikes, and launched the 
