Steam Catapult » Culture

Spook Country

David Pinsen — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:48:15 +0000

The road ahead (The GWB heading toward the mainland. Taken today).

Spook Country

I finished reading William Gibson’s Spook Country this week. Took a while to get into it, but the second half of the book had me hooked. Not a whole lot happens in Spook Country, though, as (spoiler alert) this negative commenter on the Powell’s Books site notes. Something else that commenter mentioned was that Gibson had to write the book due to some contractual obligation. Spook Country isn’t Gibson’s best work, which, in a way, makes his achievement more impressive: Gibson grinding it out is still pretty good.

Anti-Buzz again

The bit about anti-buzz in the book made me think of the press Portfolio Armor got this year (none). I corresponded with and spoke by phone with a reporter at a major business newspaper, who may write about it next year. Or not. I responded to some relevant HARO queries too. Nothing. But that’s cool. I really haven’t played the game well. And I stopped playing altogether a few months ago. I’ve been spending more time working on adding capabilities to PA than hyping it. Looking forward to unveiling some new stuff in 1st Quarter.

Happy New Year.

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Anti-Buzz

David Pinsen — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:15:46 +0000

From William Gibson’s Spook Country, p. 83 of the G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover:

“Tell me about Node, she suggested. “It doesn’t seem to be generating much in the way of industry gossip.”
“No?”
“No.”
He lowered his finger-steeple. “Anti-buzz,” he said. “Definition by absence.”
She waited to see if he’d indicate that he was joking. He didn’t. “That’s ridiculous”.
The smile unshuttered, gleamed, shuttered, and then their drinks arrived, in disposable plastic that protected the hotel against barefoot poolside litigations.

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Camels in Manhattan

David Pinsen — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:17:07 +0000

Cheryl took this pic at 8:30am today. Presumably, they were there for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.

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Predicting the iPad in 1968

David Pinsen — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:10:49 +0000

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the passage below takes place during Dr. Heywood Floyd’s flight from the space station to the moon. Although the film version doesn’t give a sense of how long that flight was, the book says it was about 25 hours, so there’d be a lot of time to kill. From p. 63 of the mass market paperback edition:

There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. He would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad in the ship’s information circuit, and scan the latest reports from earth. One by one, he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers [...] Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the unit’s front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort.

In the film version of 2001 (the screenplay of which was of course co-written by Clarke), the astronauts Bowman and Poole watch the BBC news report about their mission on devices that look similar enough to iPads that Samsung used them as evidence in its defense against a lawsuit by Apple against Samsung’s Galaxy tablet (as Mashable noted in August):

Ironically, though, in his 1973 book Rendezvous with Rama, which was set in the 22nd century, Clarke seemed to have forgotten about the implications of the Newspad. In one scene, an astronaut examines a missile sent from colonists on Mercury, and finds this inscription on a panel (p 213 of the Bantam paperback):

Department of Power Engineering
Section D
47 Sunset Boulevard
Vulcanopolis, 17464
For information apply to Henry K. Jones

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The surprising thing about the Steve Jobs veneration

David Pinsen — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 08:32:06 +0000

The most surprising thing about the reactions to Steve Jobs’s passing has been the outpouring of love toward the memory of a man who didn’t do the sorts of things that rich men do when they want to be loved by strangers. Jobs has been treated as something of a secular saint by Apple fans, but Jobs himself appears to have eschewed most of the usual obligations of secular sainthood (public charity, “corporate social responsibility”, etc.).

He declined the Buffett-Gates pledge to donate half of his wealth after his death, and wasn’t known as a philanthropist. Under his watch, Apple outsourced its manufacturing to China (as Andy Grove noted last year, for every Apple employee in America there are ten in its contract factories in China). He didn’t try to create inexpensive products for the poor — Apple products were always aimed at the high end. And stories about his management style describe him as a hard ass.

And yet, he and Apple are idolized by some as if all of that were the opposite. He was loved because he made products people loved. Had it been Bill Gates instead who passed away this week would there have been spontaneous vigils at Best Buys or wherever Microsoft products are sold? Doubtful.

Bill and (former Microsoft Bob impresario) Melinda Gates may have founded the largest charitable foundation in history, and paid for who-knows-how-many vaccines in Africa, but the world loves the man behind the iPod, not the Zune.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose: Bono and Bob Geldoff might get praised for their charitable work in Africa, but how many praise Merck for giving away Mectizan, the cure for African River Blindness? A Bing search for “Merck” + “Mectizan” just yielded me 17,600 results; I got 228,000 for “Merck” + “Evil”.

The lesson seems clear: make stuff people love enough to pay a premium for, over and over, and no one will care about the rest.

Still, as an outsider looking in — this post was typed on a Dell running XP (which I paid extra to downgrade to, because I didn’t trust the 1st version of Vista)¹ — the most amazing thing about the Apple story is that the company maintained the devotion of its fans as it made its astonishing run over the last decade, from niche computer company to a $340 billion market cap, ubiquitous consumer tech giant. Offhand, I can’t think of another company in any industry that made the leap from David to Goliath and was loved even more as a Goliath.

¹Though I did just order my first Apple product yesterday, for business purposes: the iPhone 4s.

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Updates for 7.01.2011

David Pinsen — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:43:05 +0000

Portfolio Armor update

I met with the finance Ph.D. who devised Portfolio Armor’s algorithm yesterday to discuss some potential expansions of the algorithm. More to come on that. If you have any feature requests, feel free to mention them in the comments.

June was another record month for paid downloads of the Portfolio Armor iOS app, with an 37% increase over the number of paid downloads in May. Paid downloads in May were up 17.4% over April’s numbers. The app reached as high as #13 on AppShopper.com’s list of the top-grossing iPhone finance apps this week; as I type this, it’s currently ranked #23.

Soon I Will Be Invincible

A few months ago, I recommended a book I’d read by Neil Gaiman called American Gods. That book, apparently, is a bigger deal than I thought, as is Neil Gaiman. Cheryl got tickets to see him at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan last week, and I went with her. Easily over a thousand fans turned out to see Gaiman, and they cheered him like he was a rock star.

The other author who interviewed Gaiman on stage at the 92nd Street Y was Lev Grossman. His name didn’t ring a bell for me at first, but Cheryl found out later that he was the twin brother of Austin Grossman, whose first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, was a clever, quick, and entertaining read.

Before the Gaiman event, we got ice cream from the Big Gay Ice Cream truck, whose proprietor offers some exotic takes on soft serve ice cream (my vanilla cone, for example, was topped with cayenne pepper, crushed sourdough pretzels, and chocolate sauce). Not cheap though: $11 for a cone and a small cup.

Update: Forgot to mention this, but Tom Hanks’s production company is going to produce 6 seasons of an American Gods series for HBO. Season 1 will cover the original book.

Rut-Roh for St. Joe Co. longs

I submitted an article to Seeking Alpha about this earlier today, but here’s the Bloomberg’s story on it, “St. Joe, Chairman Bruce Berkowitz Are Subject of Formal Probe by U.S. SEC”. I’m still holding the $25 strike Jan 2012 puts on JOE.

Update: Here’s my latest Seeking Alpha article on JOE.

Hedging against a failure to raise the debt ceiling

I submitted an article to Seeking Alpha about this as well, earlier today, after reading that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been hedging his exposure to Treasuries. I’ll post links here if and when Seeking Alpha publishes the articles, but something that surprised me about this: checking Portfolio Armor, the cost of hedging the iShares Barclays 20 Year Treasury ETF (TLT) is currently pretty low — 0.85% of position value, to hedge against a greater-than-20% drop between now and 1/20/2012.

Update: Here’s the article: “Helping House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Hedge his Treasuries Exposure”

2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve found myself thinking more about that movie recently. I started to write a blog post about it, in which I was going to note the juxtaposition of the banal and the profound in it. Then I saw on Wikipedia that some critic had taken the same tack, except he called it the “banal and the sublime”. Maybe I’ll write that post anyway though.

The good parts of Gravity’s Rainbow

I was also thinking of writing a series of posts about the good parts of Gravity’s Rainbow, for those who don’t feel like slogging through the rest of the novel to find them.

Fulshear, Texas

I’ve noticed a number of clicks here from that small town in Texas. Sorry there haven’t been any new posts here for a while. If there’s any sort of post you’ve been looking for in particular, feel free to send me a note or leave comment about that below.

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Lux Aeterna

David Pinsen — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 02:20:00 +0000

2001: A Space Odyssey was on cable recently, and watching it from beginning to end for the dozenth-or-so time, prompted me to surf around for related clips on YouTube. I found this annotated video clip of György Ligeti’s “Lux aeterna”, the otherworldly music Kubrick used in the scene where the astronauts fly to the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly on the moon. That happens to be one of my favorite parts of the film, and a great example of the juxtaposition of the banal (the dialogue on the shuttle craft) and the profound (this music, and the extraordinary shots of the craft traveling through the lunar night to the crater) in it.

One of the commenters on YouTube wrote,

How on earth Stanley Kubrick found this music at the time, i don’t know. Ligeti was hardly even heard of back then and was impossible to find anywhere in Europe (hence why Kubrick couldn’t ask Ligeti for the permission to use his music in 2001 and a court case ensued)

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