Posts

I’ve seen a number of links to the Everything You Need to Know About Fast Food infographic, which is chock full of interesting statistics, not all of which I’m entirely sure are accurate. It lists the average caloric intake for Americans as 3,760 calories, but I am pretty sure that is impossible. This statistic comes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, but unfortunately the link is dead. Other sources report that the average caloric consumption for men in the US is around 2,618 calories for men and 1,877 calories for women – significantly less. A little back of the envelope math shows that the number cited in the infographic is impossible. The average height of men in the US is 5’ 9.5" and the average weight is 191 pounds. The resting metabolic rate for 25 year old men of average height and weight is about 1900 calories. If you eat only 100 more calories a day than you expend, you’ll gain 10 pounds per year. ...

In a blog post that I agree with in parts and disagree with in parts, Louis Gerbarg explains how Adobe can get Apple to support Flash: If Adobe actually wants to persuade Apple to support Flash on iPhone (either as a plugin or compiled to native apps), I know how they can do it. They can get an awesome, high performance, Flash environment working on Android, and get a bunch of great Flash apps running on Android phones. As much as Apple wants to control iPhone, I am willing to bet they want to beat Android more. ...

David Simon writes to the residents of New Orleans to beg their indulgence for minor inaccuracies inserted for the benefit of better television, and to explain that they want to be judged on whether or not they get the larger themes right. Here’s a snippet: We offer this bit of information freely, as Exhibit A in what will surely become a long list of cited inaccuracies, anachronisms and equivocations through which New Orleanians reassure themselves that not only is our little drama a fiction, but that those who have perpetrated this fiction are indifferent to facts, chronologies, historical possibilities. ...

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple’s permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized. That’s the introduction to his post explaining why he’s shutting down is iPhone development blog. I still believe that this is going to hurt Apple in the end. ...

Here’s some useful advice from Chris Dixon for companies that are trying to build products without getting run over by platform vendors: Normally, when third parties try to predict whether their products will be subsumed by a platform, the question boils down to whether their products will be strategic to the platform. When the platform has an established business model, this analysis is fairly straightforward (for example, here is my strategic analysis of Google’s platform). If you make games for the iPhone, you are pretty certain Apple will take their 30% cut and leave you alone. Similarly, if you are a content website relying on SEO and Google Adsense you can be pretty confident Google will leave you alone. Until Twitter has a successful business model, they can’t have a consistent strategy and third parties should expect erratic behavior and even complete and sudden shifts in strategy. ...

Dan Froomkin on the line that ends with Justice Stevens: Stevens’s unblinking devotion to human rights, civil rights, and the rights of the little guy have led him to be widely seen as the Last Great Liberal Justice, the end of a lineage that included William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas. But Stevens is something else entirely. He is actually the last of the Moderate Republican Justices.

Obit magazine covers a phenomenon that has long fascinated me in There Goes the Gayborhood: Gayborhoods were born in the second-half of the 20th century in relatively run-down, forsaken parts of cities, away from the establishment that could give a damn about man-on-man P.D.A., and side-by-side with others who found themselves similarly sidelined: the poor, drug addicts, ethnic minorities. Sometimes referred to with the euphemism “artists,” gays became the Marines of gentrification, storming and conquering destitute places. Then, unencumbered with the financial burden of Huggie’s, ballet classes and lunch boxes, they dropped cash. Disposable incomes turned vacant factories into lofts and abandoned lots into community gardens. They brought a live-and-let-live attitude, a sense of style, and several places to eat sushi. ...

I’ve been transfixed by Apple’s announcement yesterday that applications developed using translation or compatibility layers need not apply for inclusion on the App Store. My first thought was that this was an obvious stab at Adobe, and my second thought was that this was an attempt to insure that other companies don’t abstract away the iPhone OS. I am reminded of Microsoft’s reaction to Java, specifically the early hype about Java. We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it. ...

Drizzle developer Brian Aker weighs in on NoSQL: MapReduce works as a solution when your queries are operating over a lot of data; Google sizes of data. Few companies have Google-sized datasets though. The average sites you see, they’re 10-20 gigs of data. Moving to a MapReduce solution for 20 gigs of data, or even for a terabyte or two of data, makes no sense. Using MapReduce with NoSQL solutions for small sites? This happens because people don’t understand how to pick the right tools. ...

The Wall Street Journal explains male friendships. Here’s my anecdote that exemplifies male friendship. Around the time I got out of college, my best friend in the whole world did something that made me really mad. So mad that I just quit speaking to him. Not long after, I moved to another state for a job, and didn’t stay in touch at all since I wasn’t speaking to him anyway. A couple of years later I moved back to Houston, and I needed help carrying a really heavy armoire into my house. I called him on the phone and told him that I’d buy him lunch if he helped me move the armoire. ...