More on rotation of the Earth changes

Science News Article | Reuters.com

Ask and ye shall receive I suppose. Well there you go, 3 microseconds per day faster, but that's just theoretical and is too minuscule to be measured by any of the tools we use today to measure this kind of stuff. And so a thousand sound bites are born, and overall clouding the fact that the big news is simply that there was a giant fucking earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Here's what I'd love every reporter to start their stories with:

Think about what you were doing on Sunday afternoon. Now imagine, with little more than a rumbling in the distance, being buried in 40 feet of water moving at 60 miles an hour. Now imagine that happened to you and everyone you lived with in the town you grew up with as well as the town next to you at the exact same time. And now think about the fact that (if you're lucky enough to not be dead) that you have no home, no car, no clothes and no place to go to get food, a drink of water, or even go to the bathroom, let alone suture up the giant gash in your arm or bury the 15 dead bodies in your street. Now you have a small idea what just happened in the Asia.

Please give.

Big budget movies

I saw Meet the Fokkers this past week. It was exactly as I expected and as the previews/reviews suggested. That’s not to say you will not like it, I just thought there were only a couple of jokes and most of them were recycled in spirit or explicitly from the first movie.. My question is how much did something like that cost to put together? According to the estimation at IMDB, they say the studio spent $80 million on it, and it has taken in $80 million in date (for the math/budget challenged, they just broken even, though it is still in wide release).

Setting aside the fact that the budgets for these movies tend to be really blown out of proportion and wildly inaccurate because they use the budgets to hide a lot of other movie studio expenses, I feel like there should be another way to make movies. Actually, I think most media production today suffers from the same problem. On one hand you have a massive growth of media that has occurred in the past ten to twenty years. It seems trite to mention it, but the fundamental difference between the 3 channels available in 1980 and the roughly seven hundred available today cannot be overstated. This change has happened nearly every where in popular culture. Five big budget movies a year have now become twenty. Twenty new big label records a year have now become two hundred. And so on.

The problem I think Meet the Fokkers suffers from is that the studio basically made a bet by investing in what they consider to be a known quantity vs. all the other things they could have invested in. The choices a given studio makes seem to be because these industries seem optimized for these large budget releases. I know there are a lot of very savvy business people working there, but I wonder why a company has not come along to optimize for many small releases over the large ones. Even if a movie, for example, is massively successful, it will take in $150 million. Assuming it’s not My Big Fat Greek Wedding it’ll probably cost on the order of $50 to $75 million to make giving a profit of $75 million. Assuming they had four other pictures that were released which broke even and one which bombed (made 50% of its budget back), that gives you a total allocated budget of 5 x $75 million = ~$400 million to make ~$520 million, about a 20% return on investment. Not bad!

But think of all the dollars tied up in those movies. If the industry was optimized for smaller releases, wouldn’t it be easier to make a much higher profit? For example, instead of 5 total releases, imagine if they had 20 total releases, each with a budget of $20 million. Now these movies only have to do $24 million in business to get the same return on investment. If there are three stinkers out of the bunch the total risk the company is exposed to is much lower, considering they have invested less in those three movies combined than in one big budget stinker. Alternatively, it requires much less money to be qualified as a runaway hit (does twice the budget or more).

Of course, this only covers half of the problem, and this is not novel thinking by any stretch. There are endless other factors that need to be brought in… such as the effectiveness of publicity tours, actual marketing of the movie, the value of big budget stars and the endless other activities (in some future entry, I’d love to explore these costs further).With the new media represented by the blogsphere matures and the opportunity for more news and reviews can be distributed more broadly, I hope that these companies learn to use this extremely cheap method of awareness, and optimize their investments to letting the market decide from all the different movies what should be successful rather than a set of executives determining exactly what will appear in theaters. I cannot think of anything better than having a company release 100 movies a year and letting the ones that get the good reviews or the good word of mouth be the ones that are successful. Because, right now, with the bets that companies having to take be so large, the companies will never let the market decide anything. And what we do not need right now is another company making Meet the Fokkers.

D

Magazine backlog

I love vacation... I get to catch up on all the magazines that were sitting around next to my bed. I always feel a little bit guilty throwing out these magazines (New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly) because every time I pick up a copy, I always come across something that is so interesting that I feel embarrassed that it took me so long to read the damn thing in the first place and learn it.<o:p> </o:p>

Particularly interesting for me is that it gives me a snapshot of what people were thinking just a few months ago. You’d think that you have a fairly accurate picture of what you’re reading from the magazines and remembering what you read, but looking back I find myself extra sensitive to bias and components that may have since been proven wrong. I think the amazing thing is how neutral the writers really are. Well, neutral may be a bit strong, but certainly there are not passages you come upon where the author says “A this clearly points to a Bush victory” or “This will ultimately cause Bush to lose.” At the time I was reading most of these magazines (which I think fairly securely fall into what people would call the liberal media, a term which is not only wrong, in my opinion, but nearly slanderous/libelous considering how far I think those in most media organizations bend over backwards to be unbiased), I actually felt like most of them were guaranteeing Kerry victory… just goes to show that the human mind has a terrible capacity for accurate and unbiased memory (though I suppose it could just be me).<o:p></o:p>

D

Enormous earthquake follow up

I have heard at least a few people comment that the apocalypse is upon us, what with the earthquakes/tidal waves, locusts and hurricanes from 2004. My feeling is probably that it is just random bad luck, and the human mind combines these events together to think that this time is different that all the previous times it happened (either in recorded or prerecorded history). <o:p> </o:p>

One thing that I was particularly irritated by was the concept that the earthquake “changed the rotation of the Earth”. Come on. A: What the hell is that supposed to mean and B: even if it meant that it lengthened or shortened the days for the rest of the Earth’s lifetime, by how much could the quake have affected it?<o:p> </o:p>

It irritates me that newscasters (I saw this on Foxnews, but I’m sure plenty of other agencies also reported this) felt the need to augment the description of terrible event with such a ridiculous description. Watch, I’m going to alter the rotation of the Earth right now!

Stage direction: Dave jumps into the air<o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>

Sorry I had to do that everyone… I had to prove that it was absurd. All the hyperbole and exaggeration causes something that is already amazingly large to be lost in the reporting.

One thing that the earthquake and tidal wave reminds me of is exactly how small and insignificant we really are. The Earth and Universe have been having these types of events occur since the beginning of time; this earthquake, which is not even the strongest in the last 100 years (though it was 100x stronger than the one that hit Seattle in 2001), is just par for the course.<o:p> </o:p>

Nonetheless, I strongly encourage everyone to donate money, time or whatever you can to help those in need. Based on Joel’s endorsement, I suggest OxFam. 50,000 dead at current measure… it’s more than I can even comprehend.

D

3G v 4G

Forget 3G. I'll take 4G (aka: Why WiFi is dead) | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

I'd love to think that the better product always wins, and that all wireless will be done through a simple (and single!) technology, but this is not going to happen anytime soon, despite the endorsements of the authors. The premise above is that 4G will soon replace Wi-Fi because it is technologically superior, faster, more secure, etc but the technology marketplace is littered with countless examples of this not being the case. I'm a great example. In 1997, I bought a DSL line because everyone said that it would be faster, more reliable, etc, yet cable beats DSL today by a large margin (and I've since switched back). Basically, Cable companies were faster and more flexible (they did not have to deal with the FTC as much I believe). 4G sounds like a great idea, but carriers are notoriously slow... Sprint still has not upgraded their systems in Seattle, one of the most tech savvy groups anywhere! What the experience is like in implementation (rather than in theory) and which the consumers can get first in quantity are a much clearer signs to future success than the merits of the underlying technology.

[Updated: Improved the flow of the first sentence.]

Fool.com: Sex, Lies, and Ticker Tape

Fool.com: Sex, Lies, and Ticker Tape [Commentary] December 15, 2004

Article about what makes stocks go up and down in the short term. There is a long standing stat that every summer the stock market does nothing and every winter the stock market rallys. While I am well aware of the dangers of using this causality vs. causation, I would love to take the earnings and dividends for companies for the past hundred years in 6-month chunks (similar to the season changes) and see if there is a correlation between ups and downs in those measures and the stock price that is stronger than the one you see here for the seasons. The stock price is supposed to represent the value of the underlying company but, much in the way a $120 pair of Nikes is not significantly more valuable than a $20 pair of Arizona sneakers without society to apply that value, I question whether or not it is all just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the total amount of people who actually hang onto stocks long enough to realize the amount they paid for the stock in dividends or dispersals (after the company breaks up for example) is vanishingly small, using this as the way of measuring underlying value seems to be almost arbitrary. Yes if you DID hold onto it for that long, it WOULD pay you x, but you’re not going to so why not value it on what it will do for you in the next 6 years (or however long you’d like to hold onto it). It is like befriending someone because you think they’ll give you money and leave you in their will when they die. I anxiously await the economists to chime in on how I’ve gotten this very very wrong.

Emergence

Slashdot | Emergence

Terrible review, but very interesting subject. I got in a fairly decent discussion the other night with a friend of mine about this subject, though we did not use the term "emergence". Quick sum up, Emergence is when large behaviors can be seen (for example, an anthill being built) from small individual behavior (each ant feeling like the right way to get in and out of the hole is with a certain basic body movement) rather than some centralized order (the queen ant dictating that an ant hill must be built). Logically, I love this thought and I think it shows up everywhere. In fact, this is exactly the kind of behavior that I think tends to cause traffic, polution and any number of other ills. Of course, it also provides endless gains as well... the Internet and all the resources it provides is a great example of that. If I had one thought, it would just be that people understood that very small behaviors can cause great effects, either for good or for bad.