garry’s subposterous

More drugs are going to come along, and some of them will have the characteristic that they not only make sick people better but they make healthy people still better. These drugs will be there, we need to think about how we should deal with them. One strong reaction is a knee-jerk “We should ban them”: that they’re cheating, that they’re unnatural, that they’re somehow wrong. The main point of this article is that we don’t agree with that. Enhancement is not a dirty word. I’m a teacher—my job is to enhance people. I’m a parent—my job, until they became teenagers, was to enhance my kids.

We do enhancement all the time. Education is enhancement. And as a law professor, I’m not only teaching my students facts that are important to them, but ways of manipulating those facts, ways of dealing with them. That’s cognitive enhancement. And it only works if I actually change their brains. If you remember tomorrow anything I’ve said today, it will be because I’ve made physical or electro-chemical changes in the cells of your brain. It’s kind of a weird thought, but true. So why is it that we do enhancement by so many other ways, but if you start talking about doing it through drugs, suddenly it becomes evil?

‘We like to think that if people are smarter and working better—their brains are working better—the world will be a better place.’

Well, I think part of it is, drug is a dirty word. Somebody’s talked about our pharmacological Puritanism. It’s a very love-hate relationship, as all of us who enjoy a glass of wine know. I mean, our society is probably one of the biggest users of drugs that change mental states, and also one of the most negative toward them in this odd sort of way. Well, there’s some good reasons to be worried about drugs, and we’ve laid some of them out, particularly enhancing drugs: safeness, coercion and fairness. And those are appropriate concerns, but they’re not knee-jerk concerns. They’re not, “All enhancing drugs are bad in all circumstances at all times.” Right now, to the extent the public has thought about this issue at all, it’s kind of the knee-jerk “drugs are bad, enhancement is bad, let’s ignore it.” Not a good solution.

Really interesting interview with a Stanford Law Prof Henry Greely who is pushing the discussion on bioethics and medicine.

Don’t [let] the old 9 out of 10 new businesses fail cloud your vision. It has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t market their product that has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t build a team that has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t price their services properly that has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t earn more than they spend that has nothing to do with you.

Great companies are built on creating new markets, not increasing market share in existing ones.

Too frequently men (especially younger men) will by default listen to whoever talks tough rather than the people who make the most reasoned arguments. They will listen to blow hards and pundits all day and blindly follow their leadership on fad after fad, never really questioning whether these people are worth listening to in the first place.

The audience today was one of the most encouraging signs I've seen that the recession is not going to shut down the startup world. Not just the number of people, but the degree of interest they had. You could not have told there was anything amiss with the economy if you didn't already know.

I love backtype.com -- they have done an incredible job finding and helping people subscribe to comments that would otherwise be lost completely to the ether.

LOL thanks to my friend Kenshi from chatterous.com

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

IN THE EARLY years of this decade, General Motors had a goal, and it was 29. Determined to boost its flagging profits and reverse a long, steady fall from postwar dominance, the automotive giant did the natural thing: it set a goal. The company pledged to recapture 29 percent of the American market, the share it had ebbed past in 1999. The number 29 became a corporate mantra, and some GM executives took to wearing lapel pins with the number emblazoned on them.

It didn't work. GM never did regain 29 percent of the market, and today, facing the possibility of bankruptcy, it looks even less likely to do so. The lapel pins are gone, and that number isn't much heard from the company.

For oldtimers who received no replies, 84% posted again. For oldtimers who did receive a reply, 86% posted again. For newcomers who received no replies, 16% posted again.

What's startling though is the effect getting a reply had on newcomers posting their first time. When looking only at newcomers, getting a reply increased their likelihood of posting again from 16% to 26%. That's a 62% increase!

Here's a fun little tip: You can open most Sentex key pad-access doors by typing in the following code:

***00000099#*

The first *** are to enter into the admin mode, 000000 (six zeroes) is the factory-default password, 99# opens the door, and * exits the admin mode (make sure you press this or the access box will be left in admin mode!)

I'm not sure how prevalent they are, but here in San Francisco, Sentex building access systems seem to be the most popular.