Status-Q

Moshe Yudkowsky, in his eTel talk, used a wonderful quote from Agatha Christie, who apparently once said:

I never expected to be so poor that I couldn’t afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car.

I liked this parable, quoted on LifeClever.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot, albeit a perfect one, to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Rose pointed me at a nice article about some kids in Humberside trying to bring back some water voles that were relocated to Devon when building work threatened their habitat.

Keisha, 10, said: “I’m worried the water voles will be extinct in Goole because if they move to Devon they might die because they won’t know their way round.”

The building developers have apparently relented and are returning the voles to Humberside, to the satisfaction of all concerned. Except, I rather suspect, the voles themselves…

From The Dilbert Blog…

I think the worst super power you could have would be x-ray vision…

If everyone had x-ray eyes, you would hear sentences that you’ve never before heard, such as:

“Let’s take a break. As you can see, my bladder is pretty much topped off.”

“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”

Brian Sutton-Smith, University of Pennsylvania

Humphrey Carpenter is a great writer of biographies, and I’m currently enjoying The Inklings, a sort of ‘group biography’ of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends. I liked this quote from Williams:

Much was possible to a man in solitude, but some things were only possible to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly.

Guy Kawasaki has some interesting observations on what makes Silicon Valley work, for those wanting to replicate its success. Some of them are quite unexpected:

High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids—I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it’s easier to “make it big,” and you want it to be hard to make it big.

A while back, I wrote about the danger of putting too much emphasis on what customers say they want. I’ve just come across this quote which is rather nice:

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal — they blog a lot — but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”

[The emphasis is mine.] This is from a TIME magazine article which has disappeared behind a premium firewall, so thanks to Nick who posted it as a comment on Kathy Sierra’s site. Nick added:

Stick to satisfying expectations and they’ll end up being the limits you’re chained to!

My brother sent me a birthday card recently with a picture of a spider on it. Inside he had written:

Little Miss Muffet,
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And said, “What’s a tuffet?”

I missed this when it came out… Guy Kawasaki says that anyone pitching their company to a VC should adopt the 10/20/30 rule:

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.