Why so serious? Nate Silver of 538.com points out we're not doing so bad after all.

Housing prices are significantly off their peaks, for instance, but have still increased by roughly 20 percent since January 2000, after adjustment for inflation. And we remain wealthier now than we were at almost any other point in the past (per capita disposable income is about 18 percent higher than it was a decade ago). If the good times are never as good as they seem, neither, perhaps, are the bad ones so bad.
via esquire.com

Chill out people! Maybe the world isn't coming to an end. If anything, we are falling for recency bias, which is what got us in this ridiculous quagmire in the first place.

Postbox -- The new email client that totally rocks. Now in public beta, released today. I highly recommend it.


My friend Scott MacGregor is a cofounder at Postbox Inc -- he previously was the lead developer on Mozilla Thunderbird. They recently left Mozilla to work full time on Postbox, which is built on top of the Thunderbird core.

Desktop Email Revitalized
Remember all those things that Gmail does well but other mail clients are kind of crappy at? Conversations in threaded view? Fast search? Extracting out links and other useful stuff like addresses and phone numbers? These guys got it right.

Bugs are fixed, and fast
Especially on Mac OS X, which always had nagging bugs in the editor that never were fixed previously. I can finally paste screenshots into my mail editor window. Admittedly, Mail.app has always allowed this, but when you have multiple IMAP accounts with thousands of messages Mail.app is kind of a non-starter.

Their public beta is downloadable as of today -- works great on OS X, and I believe they have Windows versions too.

http://postbox-inc.com

ConnectU guys made out like bandits -- a cool $65 million settlement with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Also, are ideas worth 3.25%?

via venturebeat.com

Either someone just got paid off for being a real litigious nuisance with otherwise baseless claims (unlikely) or Zuckerberg really kind of was over a barrel with respect to his previous business partners (likely).

Perhaps this also settles the age old question of how much an idea is worth vs. execution. At $65 million, and assuming Facebook has a valuation of at least $2 billion (very conservative estimate), that would put the idea at around 3.25%.

EDIT: My roommate Alex reports "Actually the gloating is worth 65 MM... there was literal IM text from Zuckerberg to others bragging about how he ripped the idea and did the execution better and how stupid these twins were, etc."

The new Kindle 2 is hella thin, even compared to the old one. I want one. Also, 100% always connected devices are awesome.


Crazy -- that coupled with being able to download/buy/read tons of books = awesome. The old one looked kind of thick and clunky, like retired librarian / IBM PC jr. style. The new one is a lot sleeker.

This is also the first example of a 100% self contained networked device that I've seen that works wonders. It piggybacks on the cell network but requires no additional wireless contract. I hope the AT&T and T-Mobiles of the world realize they are sitting on an absolute goldmine of the future, since they will own the pipes to ubiquitous computing. Here's hoping they don't kill the goose that will lay them golden eggs by implementing draconian and regressive pricing structures on always-on always-connected zero-setup devices.

Apple, Amazon, and other huge firms have great clout to negotiate with the telecom behemoths, but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in up and coming device startups that would benefit massively from an on-tap always-on network. The key feature is no setup. Like the fax machine, there is massive value in digital appliances that just work when you press the power button. No sync, no setup, no downloads, no pairing. I think we're on the cusp of another revolution. Now if only it were easier for device makers to plug in with no fuss... now there's a free startup idea for you. =)

Christian Bale takes his job seriously. Very very seriously.

Much has been made about Christian Bale's pissed off rantings on set. Yes that's him on the left. And the right.

But seriously, respect. I just saw 2004 movie The Machinist (left), which Bale made right before he did Batman Begins. He lost 60 lbs on his way to becoming 120lbs for the role of the coming-unhinged machinist in question, then promptly gained all the weight back and added 20 lbs of muscle for his role as Bruce Wayne (a record weight loss/gain for any actor). Along the way, he's been tackling some of the most intense and uncompromising roles of anyone. He's not gonna be Kindergarten Cop anytime soon.

If Christian Bale were president, he would probably karate chop bank managers into lending money again. He would resurrect Keynes from the dead to be his Treasury secretary. Also there would be 0% tax and a budget surplus.

If Chuck Norris and Christian Bale ever got in a fist fight, I am pretty sure Christian Bale would take Chuck out. Along with most of the Eastern seaboard. It would be pretty epic.

View the world through your own lens, not one pre-crafted for you by talk radio or your friends or society

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
via paulgraham.com

I was just thinking this recently. I think PG was prompted to write this quick essay due to a recent poll on Hacker News regarding whether people were theists, deists or atheists. I think it was 3 to 1 atheists to theists.

When I was a teenager, I liked to watch documentaries about the New Left of the 60's. I considered myself liberal by all accounts. These days, I feel less like ascribing to a single worldview than ever before. It doesn't make sense to call yourself a liberal when all it means is rubber-stamping ideas on a panoply of vaguely related issues in current times.

Of course these days the proper word for liberal is progressive. But I'm not a progressive, nor am I conservative. I'm just me, and I'd like to think I can try to read and understand any given issue and not be clouded by a particular lens. PG is right. Labels are dumb. Think for yourself.

I'm not saying I don't see the world through a particular lens. But it's a fool who always uses a lens pre-crafted for them by talk radio (of either wing) or what it means to be conservative or liberal or theist or atheist. At least try to craft your own. Somehow, I think we'll be all better off.

TED Talk: It's better to attribute our brilliance to an ethereal creative genius than to ourselves.

[Gilbert] relayed a story that musician Tom Waits told her years ago. One day he was driving on a Los Angeles freeway when a fragment of a melody popped into his head. He looked around for something to capture the tune -- a pencil or pen -- but had nothing to record it.

He started to panic that he'd lose the melody and be haunted by it forever and his talent would be gone. In the midst of this anxiety attack, he suddenly stopped, looked at the sky, and said to whatever force it was that was trying to create itself through the melody, "Excuse me. Can you not see I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment ...  otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen."

via blog.wired.com

LOL, go bother Leonard Cohen. I wish TED would someday just decide to open its doors and go full live screencast. I can't wait to see this talk.

Years ago when I was at Stanford running ASES, an entrepreneurship club, we made a decision to open up the talks to anyone on campus. We spent months preparing a one week conference for dozens of students from all over Asia who came to learn what made Silicon Valley tick. But why not make it free to all? Knowledge is power and is free to duplicate.

And these days, in the time of ustream.tv and justin.tv and seesmic, qik and all these great realtime video streaming services, there's no reason not to live stream. If only AV tech could catch up and save us from the snap crackle pop of bad audio/video. But I think that will come with time.