the new Mount Kimbie album. on repeat, pretty much always, in my head right now.
if you're not listening to
Manufacturing guy-at-large.
the public radio progress/mvp
last week. some real text is sorely needed at this point, but it'll have to wait for now :(
anyway, we're making some real progress. the physical enclosure is mocked up and we've got a good acoustic test going. we should have the actual amp mocked up in a few days, and will be working on the rest in the coming week or two.
the mvp is an off-the-shelf amp circuit, an ipod, and a speaker (the volume potentiometer isn't connected to anything), housed in a mason jar. it sounds pretty great, though it's tough to change tracks/channels on the ipod. luckily that won't be an issue on v1.0, which will have a fixed band FM tuner only.
test ride.
last week.
encounters in sinophobia
"hey, well - china sleepy."
as a recently freelance guy who's looking for some extra cash and every-possible-way to network, i've been moonlighting (daylighting) as a bike mechanic. this is not exactly a career move for me, but it turns out that working on bikes is something i'm halfway decent at - and, moreover, that diagnosing customers' reported issues is something that i'm well suited to. and anyway i do need the cash.
despite myself, i enjoy working there. the clientele are high end and polite, and my coworkers are totally pleasant people. they're kind, thoughtful, and respectful of each other and myself; i would even go so far as to say that i like them. i bring value to the shop, and the shop brings me value too, and there's a mutual respect that's important to have in one's life.
in a lot of ways, though, i'm not exactly one of the dudes. the kinds of things that i'm most interested in - structured systems; means of production; frameworks from which to assess the world - don't always fit into the shop discourse. i'm a stickler for argumentative reasoning, and in my experience, bike mechanics tend towards a top-down distribution of knowledge. it's not an uncommon or surprising tendency, and is one that i think is pervasive - to much benefit - in many industries. manufacturers distribute specific guidelines for how parts should be installed, used and serviced, and individual users are instructed to follow those guidelines closely. it is not a system that rewards innovation. then again, neither is commercial airline navigation, and as Atul Gawande has documented so well, the track record of professions which implement and follow preplanned procedures usually have lower levels of failure.
i hesitate to say that i pick fights about, for instance, whether a torque wrench should be stored at its lowest setting regardless of the consequences. more likely, i suspect, is the exact opposite relationship. i consider the null hypothesis because of the consequences. not only does a rigorous examination of an argument or statement of fact ostensibly increase the likelihood of my making an accurate judgment, but it has a significant social effect as well - and not one that is exclusively positive. and while i can't accurately say that i enjoy being alone in insisting that a particular widely held opinion might be wrong, i also can't deny that i have tended to put myself in that position time and time again. what this says about me and my ultimate desire to be liked - or disliked, as the case may be - i can only surmise.
- - -
i can't say why i chose to take a class in contemporary Chinese film my first quarter at college, but i did, and my decision to do so is something i have returned to often since. it's not that i took the class itself particularly seriously, but i found the content to be highly compelling. i would go on to largely ignore China for he rest of my college career, but i always took an interest when anyone i met had been there or spoke Mandarin. my enthusiasm for the history of the group of civilizations comprising what we know of as China is largely unconstrained, a fact that i have made real (and somewhat pitiful) efforts to encourage in myself and those around me. when my sister spent a year in Beijing, i downloaded some Mandarin instruction tapes and made lame attempts to get through the first couple of lessons. when i worked with a Tibetan carpenter (and friend) for the better part of year, i pestered him to tell me about his life and travels, and encouraged him to bring in some Tibetan music. and to his credit, he did - and to the discredit of the shingling contractor i had hired, an awkward period ensued.
it's tough being a bike mechanic. wages are generally low. the work is dirty and requires both technical knowledge and (unlike many auto mechanic jobs) a significant amount of customer service. moreover (unlike most construction jobs), information turns over rapidly, and mechanics are expected to keep up with new technologies as they develop.
as a part time employee whose specific intent is to be just passing through while i figure out my career, these factors don't particularly bother me. besides, i've made my peace (after years of frustration and hurt) with the bicycle industry. at this point in my life, it's just a skill i have, and a way to support (part of) my lifestyle. it also serves as a place where i can test my ability to maintain a positive outlook and interact pleasantly with a wide variety of customers - not skills i have spent much time developing in the past few years.
and so, when a job i'm working on offers resistance to my efforts, i react mostly with bemusement. not surprisingly, i have opinions about the quality of the bikes i encounter, and much of the stock product that even the nicest shops (of which my employer is certainly one) carry falls below my personal standards. i find working on these bikes to be a particular pleasure, specifically because i would, generally, consider them unacceptable for my own use. for despite my (arbitrary and capricious) standards, most bikes are simply a pleasure to ride. this fact has been a revelation to me: i will, regularly, find myself genuinely enjoying the test-ride of a bike which, just minutes earlier, i had proclaimed to be "complete crap." to be totally fair, it is the case that i have a history of taking pride in accepting my own wrongness - a phenomenon that an astute critic might point out is equivalent to acting more right about my own mistakes, and hence more right generally, than even my most astute critics. regardless, i revel in my own ability to truly enjoy the bikes that i, from a technical standpoint, like the least.
and all of this, of course, is from the standpoint of the mechanic. from a consumer's perspective, the case is even more stark. crappy product is, often times, far and away the best option. if you disagree, i would be happy to up-sell your $800 Felt for a $10K American-made bike, but i can tell you with all honesty that the incremental return on investment will be infinitesimal.
it is my impression that these facts are highly troubling to most mechanics. anyone scraping by in NYC working for $15 an hour knows that there are a few billion people in the world that would kill for a fraction of that wage, and i think it's not lost on such Americans that their hold on such relatively high wages is precarious. sure, many of these people have delusions of grandeur as likely - or unlikely - as my own (it's not only i that am making a stop as a grease monkey on my way to a career). but i have put in my time defining myself as someone of the bike world, and after i was done, i put in my time defining myself as someone apart from it - and now i'm just a guy who can, if called upon to do so, build, diagnose and fix bikes. it's possible that some of my coworkers feel similarly of themselves, but i have seen no indication of that.
viz. their highly confused attitudes towards Chinese production. keep in mind, these are, from all appearances, totally kind and fair-hearted people. a few of them speak Spanish fluently and are fond of conversing with the delivery guys (who ride, almost without exception, bikes that are dirty, poorly maintained, and generally unpleasant to work on) in their native language. certainly, nobody would think of making derogatory comments about blacks, Native Americans, or homosexuals in the shop. and yet, when the issue of the poor quality of inexpensive stock bicycles come up, they find it acceptable to deride not the Western companies that sell and distribute the product, but its country of origin.
"china sleepy" is the most succinct manifestation of their sentiments. the phrase apparently is meant to reference the laziness, or perhaps exhaustion, of the individual Chinese worker who produced the item in question.
i had not heard the epithet until recently, and it reminded me of one i encountered on jobsites many years ago: afro-engineering. i can't say i'm a fan of either phrase.
it would be one thing if these kinds of slurs were simple racism, but they're not; they are pointed criticisms of the purported inability of a culture (or, more often, group of only marginally related cultures) to produce product of a particular quality. never mind that manufacturers like Foxconn build some of the most technologically advanced devices in the world. disregard similarly that the pyramids at Giza (located wholly in Africa) remain some of the most fantastic engineering feats in history, involving a peak workforce of perhaps 40,000 workers. these sentiments ignore all reason to the contrary: the other is incompetent. end of story.
drill down a little, and you'll find the speaker will shift from the individual worker to the planners of China's economic policy. and sure, the Chinese government pegged the yuan to the dollar for about a decade. but that relationship has, since 2005, changed, and the result (as documented by Edward Lazear in the Wall Street Journal) is interesting:
The dollar-yuan exchange rate did not change from 1995 to 2005, and during this period China's exports to the U.S. increased sixfold, or at a rate of about 19.6% per year. Then, from 2005 to 2008, the value of the yuan relative to the U.S. dollar appreciated by about 21%. China's currency was "stronger" and its exports in dollars were more expensive—so Chinese exports to the U.S. should have fallen. Instead, China's exports to the U.S. continued to grow at about the same pace, averaging 18.2% per year.
The only period during which exports from China to the U.S. fell to any significant extent was during the recent recession, dropping by about one-third from late 2008 to early 2010. The dollar-yuan exchange rate was unchanged throughout this entire period. The obvious explanation for the decline in Chinese exports to the U.S. was the decline in demand for consumption goods in general.
clearly, these are complicated issues; far be it for me to attempt to reach any meaningful conclusion, here or elsewhere. my policy is simple. if you don't understand it, be interested in it - not scared of it.
a few nights ago, i was riding through the East Village and decided to stop into Dumpling Man for a quick dinner. i normally prefer the grittier spots in Chinatown, but Dumpling Man was on my way and i wanted to double-check my initial impressions of it, which was that it was okay (they serve fucking dumplings, after all, and i love dumplings) but not great.
i ordered some seared pork dumplings (texturally interesting but not particularly flavorful) and some xiaolongbao (which were abysmal) and sat on the street. the chef appeared to be Han Chinese, but the manager (or anyway the man at the counter) was white, though he seemed to speak Mandarin fluently. about halfway through my meal, a couple of girls walked up and, after some hesitation, entered the small restaurant. i could hear them discussing options with the manager, who advised them on filling options and order quantity before breaking off the conversation to holler out the window to the chef, who was leaving. they yelled back and forth, laughing at each other - completely in Mandarin - for a minute or two, and the girls stood at the counter in amazement.
i don't know what they really thought, and it would be dishonest for me to speculate. moreover, it's not as if my position - the enlightened westerner, just here to experience all the cute foreign ways of other cultures - isn't problematic.
i went to Shanghai in 2011, for an expenses-paid work trip. i had wanted to travel to China for years, and the opportunity to do so - and to visit factories there, no less - was a gift. the trip was organized by mfg.com, a website whose service is essentially linking buyers of manufactured goods with job shops capable of providing those goods. the buyer base is, as i understand it, largely Western, but it seemed to me that mfg.com's real customer base is worldwide suppliers, and that the product that they sell those customers is access to the eyeballs of a Western clientele.
the trip was fairly busy, but i found plenty of downtime - not least because i never acclimated to the time difference during my five-day trip. and so i explored on foot, visiting a variety of what seemed to be normal Shanghainese neighborhoods. i walked down sleepy streets lined with old sycamore trees. i found little food courts and gestured at crisp sesame pancakes and greasy dumplings, and found myself in low-slung slums where public services were totally ad hoc and sheet metal was the primary construction material.
i was a bit astounded that my tripmates didn't act similarly, but try to this day to understand and appreciate their methods of approaching the culture. they were mostly confined to the hotel restaurant - a place i eschewed - and squirmed as we were served eel and turtle at dinner on the town. to be fair, many of these people had worldwide procurement experience that my small-time resume couldn't touch, and many of them were able to capitalize on the opportunities the trip provided in ways that i certainly didn't. nonetheless, i got the feeling that they viewed the country as an other place, where i tried to see it as just another one.
it wasn't until my last day there that the most significant reason for this difference occurred to me. the trip organizers had scheduled a van to take a few of us across the sprawling city to its airport, and i met up with my vanmates in the hotel's parking lot ten or fifteen minutes before our departure time. the hotel was new, modern, and nice. my room cost about $200 per night, but the equivalent in New York would likely have been double that. the neighborhood was clean and had plenty of amenities acceptable to both Western and Chinese visitors. and parked in the small driveway in front of the hotel was a shiny red Ferrari. the car likely had a sticker price in the $200K range, though who knows how much the import to China cost. it was a nice vehicle, but not one that struck me as particularly unique.
i spent my formative years in Southampton, New York - one of the most vibrant resort communities in the US. in the summer, Ferraris were almost ubiquitous, and one learned to recognize cars that were interesting, as opposed to just expensive. but my vanmates - who were by all appearances intelligent, informed, and even worldly people - didn't have such a sense. and so it was i who snapped the photos of a woman from Atlanta, leaning gingerly over the hood of an Italian supercar in a nice neighborhood in Shanghai. who else was going to do it?
the previous night, i had taken a subway, and then a bus, to a decidedly normal neighborhood in Pudong, Shanghai's rapidly developing expansion zone. my companion, a Shanghainese college student who had been hired as a translator for our trip, had somewhat awkwardly agreed/suggested (we were both being a bit coy) that it would be fun to take me to Pudong for my last afternoon in town. we were both exhausted, but i was enjoying my last few hours in the country, and as she went up to her parents' apartment (i wasn't allowed), i must have looked like some weird caricature of a tourist, far from his hotel but seemingly unbothered.
she took me to a greenmarket and helped me buy mangosteens. we walked past open air restaurants, ate noodles from a cart, and went to a supermarket, where i browsed wide-eyed and insisted on buying green tea oreos. and then we returned to her street, where she asked for my business card and i awkwardly (and perhaps inappropriately) hugged her. i was emotional. i liked her, and i deeply appreciated her willingness to befriend me despite the fact that i was, for all intents and purposes, just some Western businessman in China for a few days.
- - -
ultimately, my gripe with "china sleepy" is that i don't understand who it's meant to be a criticism of. the factory workers i encountered in Shanghai, Suzhou and the surrounding area certainly didn't seem sleepy. their bosses - enthusiastic business owners, desperate for Westerners to come in and justify the doubtlessly large investments they had made in their factories - weren't sleepy either. and the companies - Western, Chinese or otherwise - that contracted the factories we saw to make parts? they're getting ahead any way they can, just like the rest of us.
the last thing i want is to condone, wittingly or not, the mistreatment of workers. and i'm no more likely (my enthusiasm for cheapish bikes notwithstanding) to buy inferior product than the next guy; i surround myself with the same collection of silly knick-knacks that one would find on Kaufmann Mercantile and Canoe. but to denigrate the work ethic of more than a billion people, and to categorically label their collective output as "crap," seems to me an injustice of equal magnitude.
and ultimately, it's more productive - and more fun - to like, and to be genuinely interested in, China. a culture doesn't survive four millennia, and multiple fractures and reunifications, without developing at the least a compelling storyline or two. it behooves us to appreciate China for that, and it behooves me to appreciate its people for the kindness and generosity i experienced there - if not for the opportunity to ride an affordable bike around the block (after a little fiddling, of course) on a beautiful afternoon in june.
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i quit my job and relocated in early february. ↩
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cf. The Checklist Manifesto, or, for a quicker read, his 2007 New Yorker excerpt from the same. ↩
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you should totally know about the null hypothesis. from wikipedia: In statistical inference of observed data of a scientific experiment, the null hypothesis refers to a general default position: that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena, or that a potential medical treatment has no effect. ↩
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n.b., "Chinese" isn't a language; you probably meant Mandarin. or Cantonese, or Shanghainese, or the five or so other linguistically distinct languages spoken in China. ↩
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if indeed.com is to be trusted, bike mechanics (a.k.a. "bike shop;" "bicycle shop") make $20-32K annually, and are subject to significant market volatility. my current wage, were i working full-time, would annualize at just over $30K; well below what MIT claims to be sufficient for one adult and one child in NYC. it's not exactly a position you build a family on. ↩
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i was self employed, building custom bicycle frames, from 2008-2011. my business had some limited success, but my concept, as it were, never really blew up, and in the end i mothballed it. it was a painful, but in the end appropriate and informative, decision. ↩
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as estimated by Craig B. Smith, mark Lehner et al and reported in a 1999 report of Civil Engineering. ↩
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the Wall Street Journal, 2013.01.07: Chinese 'Currency Manipulation' Is Not The Problem. google cached copy downloaded 2013.06.06. ↩
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mfg.com's representatives on the trip were rather cagey about their business model and the quid pro quo relationship that they seemed to have with the suppliers we visited in and around Shanghai. nevertheless, it was clear that someone was paying for the trip, and the two buses full of buyers - whose employers had only bought them plane tickets to Shanghai (the rest of the trip, from transportation and lodging to hotel buffets and dinners at classy Shanghainese restaurants, was paid by the organizers) - certainly weren't footing the bill, at least directly. moreover, at times i had the distinct feeling that i was being courted, and that the suppliers who were courting me had been promised something in return for whatever cost of entry that mfg.com had stuck them with. ↩
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the development of modern Pudong is legendary. in 1990, the area was low-lying and largely undeveloped; in 2010 it was home to some 5 million residents. i saw a small fraction of the city; its size is astounding. cf. this magicalurbanism.com post, with pictures. ↩
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read: she was a girl, maybe twenty years old, who came on the trip with us for no explicitly specified reason. i have no reason to think that anything even vaguely sexual transpired between her - or any of the other handful of similar girls who came along - and my Western counterparts, but the fact remains that the relationship between the two groups was somewhat troubling. i would like to think that i related to her on a genuine and friendly level - we became friends on facebook, and i received a postcard from her a few months after my trip - but in all honesty i can't say what her (or my own) intentions were. for what it's worth, it was genuinely interesting to gleam her reactions to the factories we visited; she provided a perspective i could not have seen otherwise. she also humored my pronunciation questions quite charmingly, and, as described further here, invited me into her neighborhood and showed me a totally compelling view of her city. ↩
why conservatives hate citibike
from new york.
how to carry things on your bike
creatively.
as summer1 progresses and the weather gets warmer, my modes of transportation shift dramatically. i love proper, miserable East Coast summers, and revel in the fact that everyone is uncomfortable all of the time. i even revel in the shear hotness of movement; in the fact that just walking turns you into a wilting rag on legs. but socializing with a rag on legs isn't all that impressive, and so i try to take measures to mitigate the weather's affects on my lifestyle and appearance.
a year or two ago, i bought a nice book bag for carrying things around on foot. i like it a lot, but backpacks fare poorly on a bike, especially one with an agressive cockpit geometry. i also own an old and not-too-big messenger bag, and use it whenever i absolutely need to carry any significant payload. regardless of the context, though, i take whatever measures i can to keep myself light, nimble, and well prepared. i keep a tool pack and some sort of lighting with me at all times but don't usually carry water, which is ubiquitous and (relatively) inexpensive. my everyday bike is sturdy, simple, and maneuverable, and i try to keep my person and personal belongings that way as well.
the actual clothing you wear is relatively easy - you wear as little as possible, and as little cotton as possible. capilene (ish), nylon and merino are my go-to options. shoes can be tricky but i have good luck with my Jordan 1s (i've put significant thought into my pedal setup for this) and am likely to ride with Sidis and Time cleats for much of the season.2
but wearing cycling specific clothing, however casual, leaves you looking like a cyclist (let's face it: not a good look) when you arrive. moreover, i find that no matter how much i plan, getting on a bike without a lock is a dangerous proposition.3
if i'm wearing jeans (the only pants i'll wear on a bike these days), i carry a mini u-lock in my right pocket.4 otherwise it's in my left hand, which tends to be fine for short distances but shitty over long periods of time. one deals.
my toolkit lives in an Ortlieb seat bag, and i generally can fit something extra - about the volume of a wallet and a phone - in there if i need to. but anything beyond that - clothes, a laptop, sunglass cases, etc - get tricky. sure, my timbuk2 is fine, but it's a nuisance when i'm not actually riding and generally leaves me sweaty as hell. i like it when it's necessary, but the rest of the time i avoid it like the plague.
one approach i've taken is to carry one of my many giveaway Rapha musette bags in my saddle bag. volumetrically, they're somewhere between a sugar packet and a wallet when folded, but they'll hold a six pack and a rolled-up t-shirt in a pinch and can be slung over the shoulder easily. they're totally convenient and very useful as an impromptu shopping bag.
otherwise, i've been getting some use out of these Velco one-wraps recently, and am keeping a few of them in my saddle bag as well. you could do a lot worse than strap stuff to your toptube, and they do a decent job at that.
ultimately: we'll all have drones. i know this sounds silly, but as the price drops i can envision even small employers buying - or better yet, renting - access to small private drones for day-to-day use. during the day they can be used to send packages around from office to office, and in the evening they can be used to drop bins of employees' work clothes off at their homes for laundering and reuse. forget the impracticality of installing showers and lockers at work; just lay out your outfit a night in advance and schedule the company drone to pick it up and leave it at the office for you to put on after your ride to work.
what, you think amazon isn't thinking of this too? it's the future, baby. and it'll be cool.
nb - as you may have noticed, i'm working out my annotation and formatting skills. thanks for humoring me.
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you know, civil summer - the time of the year when it's really hot. don't pull that "between the solstice and the equinox" shit on me.↩
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i ride road shoes. i have little understanding why anyone would ride anything else. you're going to clunk around either way, so just deal with it and get something unfashionable. besides, do you think your Chromes look cool?↩
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except training rides. no locks on training rides.↩
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i keep my wallet and a notebook in my left back pocket and keys & a pen in my front left. my phone is in my front right while on foot, but sometimes stays in a shirt pocket while on a bike.↩
test footnote
this is an example footnote post.1 it's just here to show how footnotes should display.
i wonder what else this looks like.
does it look like something you would want to read? something interesting, engaging, and informative? something not-too-lorem-ipsum?2
what about blockquotes?
One of our first observations was that many meetings weren’t working as well as they should. A well-run meeting is a great thing; it empowers people to make decisions, solve problems, and share information. But badly-run meetings are a demoralizing waste of time. We didn’t want our employees to waste either time or energy, so we gathered input and made some recommendations to help make meetings more effective.
i also like the idea of explaining complicated ideas3 inline. does that work?
One of the most famous opening lines is the one from Dickens'
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As you can see, this will show a classy popup next to your footnote, cool eh?↩
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You know, Lorem Ipsum. Fucking wiki that shit.↩
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what, do you need me to explain *everything?*.↩
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." More quotes on wikiquote.↩
triboro
you can call it whatever you want, but it'll always be triboro to me.
three cool things about randall's island:
- it forms one landmass with ward's island, to which it was joined by landfill in the 1930s. by - who else - Robert Moses' Parks Department.
- pedestrian/cyclist entry by the southern section of the triboro bridge is pretty dramatic while staying mostly on a human scale. the majority of the span has a handrail but no guard, so you get an unobstructed view of randall's island to the west, astoria to the east, and hell's gate to the north.
- the island is *hopping* on a saturday in early june, and it's really nice there. the breeze off the east river is delicious, and the reggaeton is charming, and anyway you're there with friends and a football and cheap beer, so who's complaining.
first reaction: McKinsey Global Institute's Distruptive Technologies report, May 2013
it's taking a few days to get through, but last month's MGI report on disruptive technologies (n.b., i'm as sick of the term "disruptive" as you are, but will leave it to someone else to come up with something better) is an interesting and thought provoking read. i won't go into all the details, but a few standout points are worth mentioning. [note: you can find the report, and follow along with me, here.]
the ranking. let's face it: this is why i'm reading the thing. mckinsey set out to determine which technologies are likely to have the greatest economic impact between now and 2025, a subject which impacts me not only as a long-term consumer and member of society, but also as a guy-who-claims-to-be-shifting-careers (n.b. the number of levels on which you could read this are...more than one). now, just because MGI decided that the mobile internet is likely to have the greatest impact doesn't mean i'm about to spend the next twelve years working on MQTT (or peddling cell phones, for that matter). but all things being equal, i want to be in a field that, 1. i can make an impact in; 2. i can leverage my ability to learn to provide high economic value for myself and the organizations i work with; 3. is compelling from a "we're-changing-the-world (in a good way)" perspective; etc. and to the extent that mckinsey's ranking captures at least some of these factors, i was excited to see what they had to say.
a few notes on the entries themselves:
- as MGI notes midway through the executive summary: "The link between hype and potential is not clear." noted.
- yeah, 3d printing is on there. at 9th place, leading up the list's long tail.
- basically, computers rock. by my count, the top six entries amount to "machines taking shit over."
- whatever you think about fracking, it's a big business opportunity for the next year or two.
- solar/wind/waves are cool, but energy storage - on both a small (e.g. hybrid car batteries) and large (smart energy grids, with the ability to transport and store large amounts of energy efficiently) - is cooler.
- graphene, man. and, like, nanotubes.
it's also worth giving a huge shout-out to the Internet of Things, which is projected to have an impact larger than the bottom five contestants combined. it also has the potential to combine with a number of other items on the list, multiplying the impact:
We see that certain emerging technologies could be used in combination, reinforcing each other and potentially driving far greater impact...It is possible that the first commercially available nano-electromechanical machines (NEMS), molecule-sized machines, could be used to create very advanced sensors for wearable mobile Internet devices or Internet of Things applications.the top of the list ends up being a list of the technologies that are the most general purpose, and thus have the most immediate day-to-day impact on consumers. the effect is largely positive - a feeling which i share myself (are you fucking *kidding* me you're not excited for google glass?!??).
Many of the technologies on our list have the potential to deliver the lion’s share of their value to consumers, even while providing producers with sufficient profits to encourage technology adoption and production. Technologies like next- generation genomics and advanced robotics could deliver major health benefits, not all of which may be usable by health-care payers and providers, many of whom face growing pressure to help improve patient outcomes while also reducing health-care costs. Many technologies will also play out in fiercely competitive consumer markets—particularly on the Internet, where earlier McKinsey research has shown consumers capture the majority of the economic surplus created. Mobile Internet, cloud, and the Internet of Things are prime examples. Also, as technologies are commercialized and come into widespread use, competition tends to shift value to consumers.
but on the labor side, the situation is quite different. as Thomas Friedman wrote in late april, "this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you." MGI writes:
The nature of work will change, and millions of people will require new skills. It is not surprising that new technologies make certain forms of human labor unnecessary or economically uncompetitive and create demand for new skills. This has been a repeated phenomenon since the Industrial Revolution: the mechanical loom marginalized home weaving while creating jobs for mill workers. However, the extent to which today’s emerging technologies could affect the nature of work is striking. Automated knowledge work tools will almost certainly extend the powers of many types of workers and help drive top-line improvements with innovations and better decision making, but they could also automate some jobs entirely. Advanced robotics could make more manual tasks subject to automation, including in services where automation has had less impact until now. Business leaders and policy makers will need to find ways to realize the benefits of these technologies while creating new, innovative ways of working and providing new skills to the workforce.
and later:
One clear message: the nature of work is changing. Technologies such as advanced robots and knowledge work automation tools move companies further to a future of leaner, more productive operations, but also far more technologically advanced operations. The need for high-level technical skills will only grow, even on the assembly line. Companies will need to find ways to get the workforce they need, by engaging with policy makers and their communities to shape secondary and tertiary education and by investing in talent development and training; the half-life of skills is shrinking, and companies may need to get back into the training business to keep their corporate skills fresh.as is my wont, my tendency is to read the paper from the perspective of the oft-mentioned "business leader." it strikes me that the advice MGI gives business leaders is the advice we should all take, albeit to varying scales (emphasis and comments below are mine):
As these disruptive technologies continue to evolve and play out, it will be up to business leaders, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and citizens to maximize their opportunities while dealing with the challenges. Business leaders need to be on the winning side of these changes. [snw: yeah... individuals too.] They can do that by being the early adopters or innovators or by turning a disruptive threat into an opportunity. The first step is for leaders to invest in their own technology knowledge. Technology is no longer down the hall or simply a budget line; it is the enabler of virtually any strategy, whether by providing the big data analytics that reveal ways to reach new customer groups, or the Internet of Things connections that enable a whole new profit center in after-sale support. Top leaders need to know what technologies can do and how to bend it to their strategic goals. Leaders cannot wait until technologies are fully baked to think about how they will work for—or against— them. And sometimes companies will need to disrupt their own business models before a rival or a new competitor does it for them.
ultimately, it is up to each individual to decide he own path through a shifting landscape. but the opportunity is out there, and it can only be realized on the individual level if the individual decides to act as his own business leader, his own policy maker:
Policy makers can find ways to turn the disruptions into positive change; they can encourage development of the technologies that are most relevant to their economies...The challenge for policy makers—and for citizens—is enormous. It is a good time for policy makers [snw: and individuals!] to review how they address technology issues and develop a systematic approach; technology stops for no one, and governments [snw: again: and individuals!] cannot afford to be passive or reactive.
from Quora
this evening, someone named Wen shi Di asked me to answer his question on Quora. i did, and i enjoyed doing so very much. my answer is reposted below.
If one of the key tenets of 3D Printing is "If you can imagine it, you can print it," then will cultures where imagination and critical thinking are discouraged, suffer a disadvantage in technolgy adoption?
It's true, the ability to create complex structures - negative draft angles, interlocking parts, voids, etc. - is much touted in the current press surrounding 3D printing. And for some physical product designers (jewelers come to mind), that ability is already having a significant impact on the creative range of printed product. 3D printing frees the designer from manufacturing constraints, and designers that are able to discard those shackles will likely see some creative benefit.
I see a few caveats to this, though, which dilute the net effect significantly.
1. I would question whether "unimaginative" cultures actually produce less creative content than liberal ones. For instance, the electronic music movement allowed for the democratization of music in many ways. Did that discourage the creative output of countries like Japan and Germany?
(It's worth noting here that I'm not even sure how to determine a consensus on which cultures discourage imagination or critical thinking. But compare the number of google results for "germany imaginative" (6.3M), "japan imaginative" (5.4M), and "america imaginative" (11.6M). Similarly: "germany creative" (289M); "japan creative" (310M); "america creative" (608M). Of course, "america" is a bit vague, but "USA imaginative" gets 7.7M and "USA creative" gets 458M, so I think it's safe to say that the English-speaking internet, as crawled by Google, thinks that the US is more creative and imaginative than Germany and Japan.)
2. It remains to be seen whether 3D printing becomes a large scale means of production unto itself, as opposed to a prototyping tool for injection-molded and machined parts. For most consumers, 3D printed objects aren't yet at the quality where they're desirable as home objects. Unless FDM machines improve part quality by an order of magnitude (let's be honest: fused deposition parts look and feel like crap), I doubt they'll ever produce objects that consumers want to be touching or seeing. Even SLA parts lack the strength and weight of most popular injection molded parts (n.b., this is all coming from someone who refuses to put even an injection molded plastic or CNCd aluminum case on his iPhone, so take my comments on user experience with a grain of salt). It's possible that SLS, if production costs can be reduced, could make consumer-ready product in the future, and who knows what other technology is nearby - or what the consumers of the future will regard as "consumer-ready." But as it stands, even the most creative designers are still largely constrained to designing for traditional manufacturing methods, if they want their designs to be produced and distributed with traditional supply channels and to a consumer base that's accustomed to the look and feel of traditionally manufactured parts.
3. Even if the designers in "unimaginative" cultures like Germany and Japan fail to fully utilize the creative freedom allowed by 3D printing, and even if 3D printing does transition into being a source of large numbers of consumer and industrial goods, that doesn't necessarily mean that Germany and Japan will be left at a disadvantage with regard to technology adoption. If SLA and SLS really do take off, there will be more than enough opportunity to go around. Every industry that deals with physical goods will be affected on a massive level, and the inability to think in terms of objects that are solid and have positive draft angles likely won't make a whit of a difference. Because regardless of how much the 3D printed jewelry of today resembles sea sponges, 3D printing needs to (and certainly will) be used for many more traditional uses for the technology to really take off.
my workspace, recently
1. one's primary focus is to understand, and then achieve, what is important to himself.
2. what is important to me is, to a significant extent, my career.
3. most nights, i find it of great importance that i spend a few hours focusing on my career.
4. sometimes, when one is focusing on one's career at night, one needs a drink.
5. white wine is nice in the summer, even if all you've got is a whiskey glass.
6. mic6 tooling plate makes for a pretty nice coaster. also it's useful when you're measuring things.
7. seltzer with a little orange flower water and a slice of lemon is also pretty refreshing.
8. folks who do 3d design and *don't* use a 3d mouse are crazy.
9. moisturizer is important.
10. things that smell a nice way are nice. my candle kinda sucks but it works in a pinch.
1. thumbtacks are cool. i got some aluminum ones that i like, and i like using them.
2. cork is cool. i got some raw cork bark when i was in portugal a few years ago, and i like it.
3. managing a tackboard is weird. also, tacks aren't a great way to hang coiled-up iphone cables, but they work in a pinch.
4. spare buttons are totally inconvenient to keep. so you're at your desk and you just pin them to your tackboard.
5. i've gotten two tickets on my bicycle in the past 6 weeks.
6. books are dying.
7. books are kinda nice.
8. if you're going to make a book, make it specific to paper. paper is a great medium to display high resolution data, which makes it great for graphics, layout, texture, etc. it's not particularly great for words.
9. whatever. i have a couple of books in my place now. i rarely look at them. i did just get the 2012 Feltron Report, which is really beautiful and which i'm super excited about.
10. i live on top of a loud, bright corner. which has its pluses and its minuses.
11. curtains are effective but the means for procuring and installing them are inconvenient, and the design options that are available are limited.
12. linen is available by the yard for pretty cheap. and it lets a nice amount of light in.
13. the street is still loud and bright, but if you want to live with perfect environmental control, you can totally just find a cave and move there.
charlie o'donnell on careers
this afternoon i attended a talk about career paths. it was given at General Assembly by Charlie O'Donnell, of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, an early seed venture capital fund. i found it highly engaging - O'Donnell really pumped me up for a full three hours - and i wanted to put my thoughts in writing here.
O'Donnell's basic message - which i won't, of cours, do justice here - was one that you can't help but encounter these days. first, figure out what you want to do; make it fairly specific. next, become an expert in it. and create content, All. The. Time. put yourself out there however you can, and the thing you want will end up coming to you.
O'Donnell approaches the subject in a way that is less self-help than The Landmark Forum, less doe-eyed than Malcolm Gladwell, and less gushy than Gary Vaynerchuk. and moreover, i tend to be a defender (albeit a sometimes hesitant one) of all of those. The Forum, despite its cultishness, is at the least a great source of perspective on how fucked up *everyone* is; better yet, i found it to be a powerful, if somewhat troubling, experience. the worst thing i can say about Gladwell is that he makes obvious-and-yet-totally-bizarre arguments about how putting in five years of full-time work (or, if you prefer, 416 straight days) on a subject will make anyone into an expert; on the other hand, he also pointed your truly towards Harvard's highly disturbing Project Implicit, which has done a lot to inform my idea of my own racial impartiality. and Vaynerchuk, in spite (or because) of his ebullience, makes a good case for pushing lo-fi content for the sake of pushing content.
O'Donnell comes from a totally different place than the sources above, and gives totally practical advice. like any reasonable person, he's short on promises: he states at the beginning that he's good at getting someone a job a year from now, as opposed to a week from now. he goes on to recommend a diversion from the standard "paint the world with your resume" model, advocating instead that you reverse engineer your career. this basically involves writing a list of job requirements for the position you want, and then getting them done. which, when you consider (as O'Donnell says) that most young companies use "x years experience required" as a proxy for some number of job skills, isn't at all an impossible task.
like Vaynerchuk (and basically anyone with a head on their shoulders), O'Donnell insists that driven people should create content incessantly:
i've been blogging for nine years now, and nine years from now, you will wish you had a nine-year old blog.
he also talks convincingly about taking on consultation work in lieu of full-time employment (debunking, in the process, the notion that consultants must be more expert than employees; after all, consider whether companies should be committing long term to non-experts without trying them out on a limited basis first), and about productizing your contract work. offering an hourly rate - however modest - to a company with limited resources is like offering to blow a hole - however modest - in the hull of a seaworthy boat (his analogy). instead, he suggests that consultants work on a per-project basis, and structure those projects in such a way that the results - and expenditures - can be easily quantified.
O'Donnell also has interesting ideas about skating where the puck is going. he notes that if your goal is to be, for example, a top tier UX designer, then you'll always be behind the curve if all you do is learn what the top tier UX designers know. he argues instead that one should aim to learn what questions the top tier UX designers are asking, as that will provide real insight into the direction that the industry is headed, and will present real opportunities in one's career.
lastly, O'Donnell touched on something that i'm aware i haven't fully grasped how to display in my own career search: the ability to adapt to a shifting landscape. growing companies need people who are able to grow, learn, and sometimes pivot, and it's important that individuals find ways to express that i am somebody who will have future knowledge. i think this cannot be understated: knowing what's best suited for today's marketplace is great for today, but i want to be someone who is great for always. when i consider career opportunities, i am looking for fields where the ability to learn is a key requirement; i must, in turn, find ways to express my ability to learn new things.
my own enthusiasm for the think market (i.e. the marketplace of ideas, books, and speakers ranging from self-help to self-empowerment to bizdev to behavioral economics) is, i would say, higher than most of my demographic. regardless, i will gladly pay my $34 to spend a couple hours on a friday afternoon listening to a VC talk about how to get the job you want. part of this has to do with my own place at the moment (viz., i don't have a full time job), but mostly i think it's just my disposition. i like thinking strategy, and i like thinking self determination, and i like thinking that the only obstacle between where i am and where i can be is myself, and i like finding ways to make myself a non-obstacle.
since i stopped working on bicycle frames, i've learned a lot about what it is i want out of my career. i like working with systems, and the bicycle world lacks the kinds of standardization that really excites me; it's very ad hoc. i enjoy home design and architectural ergonomics, but the construction world is highly disorganized, and i have had a difficult time fitting into the contractor/tradesman structure.
when people ask what i have been (this is after they've asked what i do, to which i have taken to replying with "yeah, exactly"), i tell them that i've been an industrial/physical product designer (the phrase "robot doors" often pops up as well, but that's a different conversation). when they ask what i want to do, i talk about the internet of things, home automation, and consumer electronics. but the fact is that i'm figuring it out. i genuinely enjoy learning, and i like keeping myself somewhere over my head (...that feeling of being good at what you do, but not being quite good enough, but knowing that you could be...). i like being an early adopter, and i like having (and expressing) my somewhat-original opinions about what the world will be like. and i want to be able to shape that. having a vision of your world, and having the tools to make that vision come to life - at least a little bit - is a powerful and fulfilling experience.
the hard part is knowing what my world will be. when i was in college, my world was the campus cycling community. i was plugged into it, and i had a real ability to shape it - and also, inevitably, to be shaped by it. after i graduated, my world was a fifty year old building, and i shaped the hell out of it. but so did my plumber, and his team of slackers who would show up late and spout off racist slurs at work - but who i was deeply dependent on for all of two years, an arrangement which is still troubling to recall. when i was building bicycle frames, my world was smaller yet; my business was an extension of myself, and it suffered with my inability to engage with the broader community, which i felt increasingly detached from. the chance to shape one's world comes with the danger that one's world begins to look like oneself, and when i shut down TCD, i began to finally process that lesson.
of course, one doesn't always have that chance. most recently, my work at RWD allowed me the chance to shape a project with totally new and powerful tools, but my ability to use those tools as i would prefer was limited by my position, and by the structure of the project. i recognize now that i navigated my place there in ways that i would not repeat; at the same time, the project that i was shaping was troubled in ways that i could never hope to change, regardless of my tactics and abilities. in the end, it became evident to me that no amount of sticking with my job would get me any closer to the career i wanted. and i left.
pivoting is tricky. especially if all you know is that the path you're on isn't the right one.
my path will play itself out, and i continue to not be overly worried about it - aside from staying in on a friday to bill for some freelance work, research a dozen topics, sift through my Pocket queue, and turn out some lo-fi content. if anyone has any thoughts to share, i'm all ears.
the hierarchy of disagreement
from the lovely I Love Charts tumblr.
modeling
recently.
and now, it's summer
so this outfit becomes my go-to "around the block walk" getup for like the next three months straight. which is great.
notebook
more to come.
modeling, lately.
what it's like to cook with me
man, i *fuck* with cooking.
in business, my experience has tended towards large projects - endeavors that span years, where progress from week to week can, at times, be hard to distinguish. i find these to be highly rewarding. one begins with a mental construct which is necessarily incomplete, and which develops in ways that are impossible to predict. in ways, this is psychologically challenging; my concept of myself has been deeply entwined with the projects i've been involved in, and the inevitable fact that i will be proven so deeply *wrong* about what i'm working for is troubling. but the experience is also exciting. moments come in which one feels he has a complete - fleeting, but complete - view of what he's doing. it's an exhilarating feeling.
times are, from time to time, that once i get home i want nothing to do with managing any project (read: sitcoms are kinda awesome). but more frequently, i find myself craving something that i can experiment with in a low-stakes setting.
as a result, i tend to go a bit overboard. i will go against specific orders to keep shit simple. i'll make noodles-and-butter into a dish with a dozen ingredients. i become a parody of myself at the grocery store; i fiend for complexity:
me: shit, fiddlehead ferns are in season.
companion: what are fiddlehead ferns?
me: uh, i mean, i think they're just fern heads. they grow wild... i think they're good. i've never had them.
companion: how do you cook them?
me: i don't really know. [grabs bag, reaches for ferns]
companion: wait-
me: no, this'll be good. i've always wanted to cook fiddlehead ferns.
companion: but-
me: [tosses bag of ferns into basket] oh, they have ramps too...
companion: wait - uh, what are ramps?
me: i think they're like garlic. [grabs ramps] i've never had them.
etc.
it's kind of the best. cooking is fun.
thoughts on standards, revisited
late last year, i posted some thoughts on technical drawing standards on my now mothballed business' blog. they were an attempt to clarify some things i had been thinking of over the past year or so, and they remain a useful starting point for my own style guide.
i'm now in the position of revisiting many of these items, and will be writing more of my thoughts in the coming weeks. in the meantime, i'm reposting my initial thoughts here. some of them are now more fully developed, and some have been partially discarded. regardless, i continue to welcome any comments.
I've been spending some time organizing myself and my designs, and am working on creating standards for myself. A few ideas I've had are below, in no particular order.
- When producing documentation, adopt and use standards that are optimized for digital, not physical, reproduction.
- Minimize printing whenever possible. When choosing paper sizes, prefer ISO to Architectural, and Architectural to ANSI. (Do so in spite the fact that, at least in North America, this ranking is... inconvenient.)
- Prefer decimal inch or metric dimensions to fractional inches, which round inaccurately, produce inconvenient decimals at small resolutions, and encourage draftsmen to use decimal equivalents with unnecessarily high precision standards.
- Use single spaces between sentences. (This will take some getting used to; the double slap of the spacebar has been drilled into me from years of practice.)
- Track revisions.
- Name all dimensions. Name key features.
- Produce and maintain job books which refer directly to named features and dimensions and explain fit and function of all important design elements.
- Choose cross-platform standards, assuming they don't hurt too much.
- Have fun, etc.
As always, your feedback is encouraged. I'd be interested in hearing other peoples' experience with and philosophies on standards and documentation aesthetics.
Spencer