Loyalty

LeBron James announced last night that he would leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join Miami Heat. Cleveland was disappointed, upset, and then angry. The Cavs' majority owner Dan Gilbert called the decision a "cowardly betrayal." This issue of loyalty reminds me of a survey done by market research company Ipsos back in March.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll asked more than 1,000 Americans to consider 29 categories of people, organizations, products and services, and determine whether the actions of those entities over the past two years have made them more or less loyal to them. The top of the results? 70% said they were more loyal to their country than two years ago. After that, there were "spouse, partner or significant other" (64%), "family doctor" (58%), the "brand of car" they were driving (56%), a restaurant they went to frequently (56%), their favorite music station (55%), religion (54%), and where they got their news from on TV (54%).

What about a job? Only 39% Americans said they became more loyal to their employers. That's lower than a TV show (drama 47%, comedy 41%) or a soft drink (41%). Only 55% of employees said they would stay at their job and turn down higher pay elsewhere, which suggested that 45% might "jump ship" for better offers. The poll also showed that most Americans do not believe companies are doing a good job at recognizing and rewarding loyal employees or customers. Loyalty is a two-way street. If your contribution is not properly recognized or rewarded, why stick around?

Let's face it. Basketball for LeBron is a job. Nobody can say his work was not recognized or rewarded - getting two back-to-back MVPs in the last two years is quite something. But he wants the championship so bad. “I think the major factor, the major reason, in my decision was the best opportunity to win, and to win now and to win into the future also,” he said at the press conference. LeBron has stayed with the Cavs for seven years now but got no title. If your job can't give you what you want, maybe it's really time to move on.

Technology and sport

This is a day of poor judgments in soccer. Both of the World Cup matches today involved goal-related bad calls. Would England or Mexico have won if the referees' decisions were correct? Probably not. But it was disheartening to see injustice breaking the equilibrium and ruining the chemistry in the teams.

England vs. Germany, 38th minute. A shot by England's Frank Lampard hit
the crossbar and bounced half a meter into the goal. But it was disallowed.

Argentina vs. Mexico, 26th minute. Argentina's Carlos Tevez scored the
first goal of the game on a play that appeared offside from all angles live.

It's not the first time blown calls have happened in soccer. Now-coach Maradona's "Hand of God" goal in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England is a classic. What really bothered me today was FIFA's long resistance to technology. Instant replays showed the world the truth but the referees could still deny and their decisions stood. Refs are human beings, and human beings make mistakes. But does that mean we just have to embrace human imperfection as part of the game? Why don't we do something about it?

The relationship between technology and sport makes me think of swimming. To me, the ban of "sharkskin" swimsuits makes sense because the whole point of a race is to challenge the limit of what the human body can do. "Sharkskin" technology enhances the body and the result is in principle no different from a genetically altered creature. But when it comes to the literally "technical" aspects such as judgment accuracy and hard evidence, technology should be encouraged. I remember in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps won the men's 100m butterfly gold by 1/100 of a second. There's no way bare eyes could tell this. If technology brings us precision and justice, why not?

Fat tails

Reading Niall Ferguson's narration on the history of finance, I saw many almost con-like well-planned inventions that have advanced the system of money to more sophisticated levels, and at the same time devastating moments of human spontaneity that shook our world with bubble bursts and crises. The stock markets, for example, are mirrors of an amplified tendency of overreacting. When prices start to go up, people rush to go in and buy more as if possessed by a collective euphoria - what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance." But if any bad news surfaces, people can flip overnight from greed to fear, selling and withdrawing, causing a dramatic plunge on a global scale.

In statistics, the graph of a "normal distribution" looks like a classic bell curve, with higher probability clustered around the mean and fewer instances towards the extremes. Many natural and physical phenomena, such as human heights and laser light intensity, seem to follow this principle. But the movements of stock market prices are more results of human emotional volatility than rational science of "normal." Prices can surge up steeply one day, and drop with extreme abruptness the next. Statisticians call this distribution with higher likelihood at the extremes "fat tails."

Fat tails imply risks. Things can go extraordinarily well, or terribly wrong. And it's hard to predict. Today you have a winner, and tomorrow you could have a crisis. Impulsive decisions and mood swings push things to extremes, jumping inconsistently between one end to an other. It is almost impossible to understand or follow or react. That's why the rocket science of the Black-Scholes pricing model did not succeed. Maybe the only way to deal with subjective irrationality is guesswork, which by definition gives you 50% chance.

Some say stress or anxiety is the source of poor decisions. People under stress may swing between the poles of mania and depression, suffer from perceptual narrowing that prevents them from seeing the big picture, dramatize trivial happenings that should be expected normally, or even distort reality through denial and fabrication. Is there a way to pull the fat tails back to the mean? I would say: "Calm down."

Google, Pac-Man, and productivity

Last Friday, May 21st was Pac-Man's 30th birthday. Google turned its homepage into a playable Pac-Man game for two days. We all took breaks to enjoy the fun and then told our friends to do the same. Recently, RescueTime, a company that develops time management software, has gathered statistics and analyzed the impact of this first ever interactive Google doodle. Here's the math:

- Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day).
- $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 x pay rate).
- For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
- $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I am not sure about the money count, but the estimated 4,819,352 hours is a long time. It's almost 550 years! But does that mean our productivity is gobbled? I'm not convinced. First of all, when you add up to a total number, it always looks more stunning. According to RescueTime's data, the average user only spent 36 seconds more on Google.com last Friday. That's just 1/800 of a typical 8-hr work day! Second, these 36 seconds were not taken away from a 100% productive base. If there's no Pac-Man on Google, people would still spend time reading news or going on facebook anyways. Third, we are not machines. Breaks help to recharge our brains. RescueTime founder Tony Wright himself agrees that "Leisure surfing is critical to productivity." A study actually showed that personal use of internet at work would increase productivity by 9%.

So OK, sit back, relax, and let the fun continue! (In fact, Google did let it continue. Pac-Man is here forever!)

Instant gratification - Part I

Watching All the President's Men, I was amazed by one scene: when Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) found the name Kenneth H. Dahlberg in the Miami D.A.'s office, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) started searching for the person in phone books. What is he doing? Oh I forgot, Google didn't exist in 1972, not even the term "internet."

When you hear an unfamiliar name or a strange term nowadays, the first impulse would be - Google it. So much information is available, and more importantly, searchable on the internet that most likely you will find what you need instantly. As of a few minutes ago, Google spend 0.26 second to find about 28,500 results for "Kenneth H. Dahlberg." No surprise, the first hit was an article on Wikipedia. I remember Rob Matthews once printed only the "featured articles" part of Wikipedia and what he got was a ridiculous-looking 5,000-page book.


The Information Age has turned the world into one big entangled web of digital data that is getting even denser every day. Everybody could be an expert of something with the help of the World Wide Web. The real skill now is to locate valuable information from various sources and piece it together. A new generation of intellectuals emerged. They don't need to know everything. Instead, they just need to know about things. Like ancient cartographers conquering the oceans, these neo-intellectuals surf in the cloud, facing the challenge of the storming explosion of information. Rather than learning the knowledge itself, they mentally build up a map of the largest library in the history of human civilization. When needed, they can locate the core information and have the experience and insight to bring in all the things related to it - images, graphs, events, researches, opinions, etc. I call this new comprehensiveness the art of "sort and connect."

Instant gratification - Part II

We want everything right away. When we have a question, we hope Google gives us the right answer instantly. (Good-bye, libraries!) When we hear a song we like at a bar, we Shazam it and download instantly. (Good-bye, Virgin Megastore!) When we learn about a good book from a friend, we order it through the Amazon smartphone apps instantly and have it shipped on the same day. (Good-bye, Urban Center Books!) If you say you are not that anxious, well... how many times have you complained about how slow your computer is?

One problem of this is that our generation gets more and more impatient, with an attention span that only becomes shorter and shorter every day. In the 1970s, college students could stay focused in a lecture for 15-20 minutes before their minds began to wander. The number in a recent research became 7-8 minutes - an all time low. People just want to get the work done fast, not caring much about the quality of it. "Quick and dirty" becomes the new norm. A five-minute sloppy piece that looks good at a glance can get more appreciation than one full day's careful precise work.

Once upon a time, patience was a virtue, when people still depended on pigeons to bring their mail. But in our society, where instant gratification is expected by default, waiting becomes a waste of time. We want instant communication. We send emails, text messages, online chats as fast as possible - don't even bother to spell or punctuate properly. And we expect instant response, otherwise we get all "textually frustrated." Many times, I found this counter-productive. Rather than saving time, it only creates miscommunication.

Technology is supposed to make our lives better, not worse. While enjoying the convenience technology brings us, we also need to beware of some negative implications that may turn us into those spoiled Axiom people in Wall•E.

Another perspective

When you go past a managed forest, you see a mass of tree trunks. Then at a certain point, you look again, and you realize they are all in perfect rows. Clarity. Clarity of vision. What you've been looking at from the wrong angle and not seeing at all. You labor. You sweat to see what you couldn't have seen from that other perspective.

- The Edge, in It Might Get Loud.

The plurality of perfections

In a 2004 article from the New Yorker (recently featured in the book What the Dog Saw), Malcolm Gladwell mentioned a story about Howard Moskowitz, an American market researcher, who received the task of figuring out the perfect amount of sweetener for Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below 8% was not sweet enough and anything over 12% was too sweet. So Moskowitz logically set up experiments to give people batches of 8%, 8.25%, 8.5%, and on and on up to 12%. Instead of showing a concentration that people liked the most, the data were a mess - there wasn't a pattern at all. Then he realized people have different definitions of what's perfect. Rather than search for human universals, they should provide variations. "There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis."

The plural nature of perfection implies variations, and opposes hasty simplification. Sometimes I heard comments like "this will be perfect for China." What does that even mean? Extravaganza? Labor-intensive constructions? Or Feng-shui? (Stereotype is such a curious combination of generalization and specification.) Situation varies, so does "what fits in there." Rem's Maison à Bordeaux was perfect for a man who was confined to a wheelchair. But after he died in 2001, the moving platform became a constant reminder of his absence. His daughter couldn't live there any more.

The idea of plural perfections embraces difference, and facilitates co-existence. At the end it can lead to a colorful world of rich heterogeneity. This can be big as religion, politics, race, and gender, or small as how you want your coffee. There's not necessarily one best way to do things. Why can't we just listen and stop fighting? Why can't we try to understand different opinions instead of biasedly dismiss them right away? Why do we force everybody to like what we like and suppress all the other voices? Yes, you are right. But that doesn't mean others are all wrong.

A decade of grassroots

The end of 2009 means not only the start of a new year, but a new decade. Looking back to the 2000s (or the Aughts, the Noughties, the Naughty Aughties, whatever you wanna call it), we witnessed a significant social transformation. There was a power emerging from the bottom, triggered by the information revolution. Opportunities were created equally for everybody, no matter who you are or where you are from, as long as you have the insight and skills. Anyone could be visible without going through traditional hierarchical organizations or institutions. It is a tremendous shift that reshaped the flow of cultural creativity, business management, and political mobilization. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome an ethic of hyper-self-reliant grassroots and the annihilation of authority!


Marketing
After launching in August 2003, MySpace soon became the most popular social-networking site. Although its #1 social network status was overtaken by Facebook in 2008, this virtual display platform forever altered how music was marketed - by musicians themselves. Artists and bands, famous or not, can upload their songs onto their homepage and have exposure to millions of people on a daily basis. Over the years, millions of artists have been discovered by MySpace users, among which are Lily Allen, Sean Kingston, and Arctic Monkeys.

In February 2005, YouTube was founded. A wide variety of user-generated video contents are viewed a billion times a day worldwide. You remember "Bus Uncle" in Hong Kong? A 23-year-old Korean playing Pachelbel's Canon on an electric guitar in his bedroom? I think it's fair to say SNL was more successfully marketed on YouTube (Andy Samberg videos) than the show itself on TV. Traditional media corporations such as CBS, NBC, and BBC felt the pressure to create their own accounts on the website. Businesses also felt the need to upload their TV commercials online. One recent personal experience: I have received links to the Droid commercial on YouTube from many different friends, but I've never seen it on TV.

Journalism
Talking about media, traditional news felt intimidated by the grassroots as well. As of 2003, there were fewer than one million blogs, but now there are over 110 million worldwide. Bloggers report events before the New York Times knows about them, publish commentaries before the White House calls for a press conference, and release gossips with photos before People Magazine gets a hold on the stories. You may dismiss the credibility of Perez Hilton, but the success of Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG has earned him opportunities to lectures and (paper) publication, a teaching position at Pratt, and most importantly, respect in the architectural world.

In July 2006, Jack Dorsey created Twitter. The era of micro-blogging began. With a monthly growth of 1,382%, there are almost 60 million people in Twitterville now. Unlike Facebook's "What's on your mind?" Twitter asks users to post "What's happening?" with no more than 140 characters. This is a powerful tool for news and information exchange. With the popularity of camera phones, users can upload tweets and twitpics right on the spot. "Trending topics" reflect from the bottom the pulse of our world. During the 2008 Mumbai attacks, eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 tweets every 5 seconds. Twitter users also sent out vital information such as emergency phone numbers and the location of hospitals needing blood donations. CNN called this "the day that social media appeared to come of age." Ironically, the number of CNN followers on Twitter was later out-beaten by Ashton Kutcher (not quite a grassroot but at least an individual), whose followers reached 1 million on April 16, 2009.

Entertainment
The first show of American Idol debuted on June 11, 2002 on the Fox network. All of a sudden the girl next door can be the idol of the nation. But the more significant part of the program was viewer voting. The "judges" were there just to comment, and the true power of deciding who would win is in the hands of the general audience. No matter how much Simon hates her, you can still vote for her. In Season 8 (2009), more than 100 million votes were cast in the Finale and a record-setting 624 million votes over the season. On the other side of the globe, a singing contest with similar format called "Super Girl" gained enormous popularity in China. On August 26, 2005, 8 million SMS votes flooded into the finale and made Li Yuchun an instant national icon. Time Magazine Asia featured her on the cover and named her one of the Asia's Heroes 2005.

In April 2009, Susan Boyle amazed the world with her "I Dreamed a Dream" performance on the Britain’s Got Talent show. But what truly made her famous was not the show but the web. Within 9 days, videos of her song were watched over 100 million times online. The most popular YouTube clip was viewed nearly 2.5 million times in the first 72 hours. She released her debut album in November. Almost 3 million copies have been sold and it is currently No.1 on the Billboard album chart for a fifth week.

Academia
Authoring an article in the encyclopedia was regarded as an honorable recognition of "expert" status. But now anybody with internet access can edit Wikipedia - no academic credentials required. Since the first wiki went online on January 10, 2001, there have been nearly 19 million pages (more than three million articles in English) that went through more than 356 million edits. The crowds collaborate as editors, and at the same time the police to keep the entries (mostly) accurate. Wikipedia provides an open and flat platform for knowledge, and the source is the entire society.

Wikipedia changed the way research is done. Then what about the occasions when you need an image to illustrate your argument? Yes, Flickr. Since its launch in February 2004, this image hosting website has drawn more than 4 billion images, uploaded by more than 7 million users. Even White House photographer Pete Souza started to officially release White House photos on Flickr in May 2009. To make searching easier, Flickr encourages users to assign tags - keywords that describe and identify images. As a result, the cloud of non-textual data is categorized in particular textual topics, with the help of everybody. This new approach of "folksonomy" (folk-taxonomy) rapidly spread throughout the web.

Business
The wisdom of the crowd also changed how businesses ran their tasks. Netflix launched the Netflix Prize on October 2, 2006. It was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. By October 8, a team called WXYZ Consulting had already beaten Netflix's own results. On September 18, 2009, the team "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos" received the grand prize of $1,000,000 as the first to beat Netflix's own algorithm by 10%. This is just one of the many examples of so-called "crowdsourcing," a business model that relies on the general public other than employees to fulfill the tasks. Just as the Chinese would say, "Three stinky cobblers combined equal Zhuge Liang the mastermind."

Politics
Maybe the climactic moment of grassroots power in the last decade was the 2008 Obama campaign. It was the ultimate example of bottom-up political mobilization. On BarackObama.com, features like "create your own event" and "create your own Obama group" created a voters self-organizing system. Obama HQ provided the tools for these people to meet, organize, fund-raise and canvass voters, and the crowds mobilized themselves spontaneously from within. You won't be surprised to see groups like "Anime Fans for Obama" and "Barack the Kitchen Club." Throughout the campaign, 2 million people created profiles on Obama's social-networking site, more than 1.2 million volunteered, and 3 million gave him money. The Obama campaign also launched an official iPhone app with details of the candidate's views on various issues, and features to locate fund-raising events near you. When you search Obama on YouTube, you see campaign ads posted by the official Obama account, while under John McCain there were only negative videos edited by web users. If the choice was between someone who will bring a Wii to the White House and someone who doesn't really know how to use a computer, the pick seemed obvious for the 00s.

How long does it take to get the work done?

When trying to estimate the time you need to get something done, there are some laws you might need to consider. In fact, it turns out not to be a question of efficiency or productivity, but of our inevitable human nature.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979, this law tells us the reality of planning fallacy. Neil D. Weinstein's researches in the 1980s discovered that the majority of people are actually egocentric and therefore tend to have an unrealistic positive belief about their future (called "Optimistic Bias"). Underestimating the probability of negative events certainly leads to miscalculating time. Half-jokingly, Hofstadter offered a rule for correction: double the number and step up to the next higher units. For example, a job estimated at 1 hour can be accomplished in 2 days, while a 3-month project will take you 6 years.

Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson stated this law in his 1955 article in The Economist, followed by statistical evidences drawn from his historical research, such as the fact that from 1914 to 1928, the number of British Admiralty officials increased almost 80% while the Navy diminished by a third in men and two-thirds in ships; and also the increase of the Colonial Office staff during the decline of the British Empire. Parkinson explained these with two motive forces: an official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and officials make work for each other. Have you ever had the feeling that your team leader was always trying to get more people on the team, and would always come up with something for you whenever you were just about to open your web browser?

Student syndrome: Many people will start to fully apply themselves to a task just at the last possible moment before a deadline.
We've all been students and we all remember how we dealt with the long-term assignments. We might start early, but the last minute would most likely be stressful anyways. You may think procrastination relates to either laziness or perfectionism. Psychologically, it's just caused by two basic human tendencies: we would relax when things seem easy and try to avoid the things that seem to be difficult. That's why it's so hard to start organizing a messy room or working on the portfolio. Some scholars also pointed out the importance of motivation. If the task is boring or I don't feel rewarded for doing it, why would I spend time on it now when there is so much fun out there?

OK, how long does it take to get it done? I guess the perfect answer would be "When is it due?"

Elements of happiness

A recent study by Andrew Oswald (University of Warwick in England) and his team ranked the US states according to their residents' life satisfaction. At KJ&J's suggestion, I started to collect information and tried to find out what make some states happier while others less cheerful.

Geographically speaking, the Sun Belt appears to be happier, with the exception of California. The Rust Belt seems to be pretty gloomy. I guess weather does affect the mood a lot.


There are also socio-economic aspects. The chart below is trying to decipher the meanings of living environment, race, income, health, education, family, religion, safety, and politics, in relation to the notion of happiness.

(click to enlarge)

The comparison doesn't seem to be very conclusive. But at least we can see some tendencies:
- Curiously enough, race, money, and family don't seem to matter much.
- High density can cause stress but low density doesn't necessarily make you happier.
- Fat states tend to be happier.
- The pattern of the education column looks quite random but at least the percentages of Bachelors and higher in the top 16 happy states are all under 30%.
- People who live in the top 10 happy states obviously care more about religion than the bottom 10. Actually, the area of "Sun Belt minus California" is called the Bible Belt.
- Crimes don't seem to affect people's mood much either. In fact, the crime rates of the top 6 are quite high.
- Politically, I think everybody can see blue concentrating at the bottom.

Living in the least cheery state of all, I actually consider melancholy a cool thing. (Yay Charlie Brown!) It gets you to think, to contemplate life with the will of improvement, not merely satisfaction. I would rather be "unhappy" than being a fat ignorant conservative, living in the suburbs with no ambition, and going to the church every morning...

Exchange

"If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we each have one apple.
If you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each have two ideas."

- George Bernard Shaw

Think positively

There's a big difference between seeing problems and being negative. It depends on your reactions to the problems. When some people see problems, they start to get frustrated. They sigh; they yell; and they think they are doomed. Another kind of reaction, which I would include in the category of positive thinking, is to actively seek solutions and take actions that will make things better.

Being able to identify problems is a skill. The positive attitude behind it is the audacity of hope. The Chinese phrase "crisis" comprises two characters: danger and opportunity. Seeing danger, and more importantly seeing opportunities in danger, gives people the courage to face reality and survive the crises. In the field of design, there are numerous examples where constraints are turned into the source of innovation. If you have a hopeful and constructive mind, challenge can always have positive influence and sparkle a new kind of creativity. "What's against it works for it."

In my opinion, the truly negative people are those who fear to face, or even don't care to understand reality. They live in their own world, like ostriches burying their heads in sand, pretending there's no problem and the world is all beautiful. This sounds nothing optimistic to me. It is just naivety. It is full of self-indulgence and lacks care. Of course, it's important to always look on the bright side, but it doesn't mean we should ignore the existence of the dark side. When small problems are neglected, they could accumulate and become big ones. Then it may be too late for any solution. In fact, ostriches are better than that. They actually do not bury their heads in sand. When threatened, they run away. I guess it's at least an acknowledgment of reality and probably the only one effective and constructive solution. If you know you can't win, RUN!

Blind men and an elephant

Buddha tells the story of eight blind men touching an elephant and trying to learn what it is like. The blind man who feels the elephant's tusk shouts out, "the elephant looks like a daikon radish!" The others disagree and assert that it is either like a dustpan (the one who touches its ear), stone (head), a pestle (trunk), a wooden mortar (leg), a bed (back), an urn (abdomen), or a rope (tail). Buddha continues and explains, these men see only one side of a thing. In their ignorance they are by nature disputatious, each holding a fractional view on reality as thus and thus.

As Spock would say, reaching a broad conclusion from limited evidence is not logical. It's called hasty generalization. Think about sustainability which everybody is obsessed with. One general belief is that paper is degradable but plastic is not, so it seems "natural" to conclude that paper bags are more environmental-friendly and we should all use paper bags instead of plastic ones. But this is just one side of the story. What about the trees we cut to make all that paper? In the manufacturing process, plastic bags only consume about 18% as much energy, and less than 3% of the fresh water necessary to make paper bags. According to an analysis by Franklin Associates, Ltd, during the life cycle of both types of bags per 10,000 equivalent uses, plastic creates 9.1 cubic pounds of solid waste vs. 45.8 cubic pounds for paper; plastic creates 17.9 pounds of atmospheric emissions vs. 64.2 pounds for paper; plastic creates 1.8 pounds of waterborne waste vs. 31.2 pounds for paper. When you see the big picture, the saint-like aura around paper bags disappears.

The same trend happens in the field of architecture. Architects are obsessed with green jargon. But how many really understand what it means? Geothermal for a small house? PV panels on the north facade? Yeah, I bet it sounds a lot fancier to say "solar energy harvesting from all around the building."

Another trend in contemporary architecture is the dominance of flashy images. Everything comes down to how it looks rather than how it works. Critics base their judgments just on images, and architects design only the images. We see beautiful renderings that intentionally avoid certain aspects of reality (Zaha's monolithic shapes or Greg's super-blobs?), beautiful photos with fantastic lighting that conceals the detailing flaws (can't forget this), and beautiful moments captured by tasteful photographers that glorify the entire building no matter how lame it is as a whole. Yes, we all love eye-candies, and we would like to believe that's reality. But unfortunately, we are all blind...

The consequences are severe. Everybody is lazified (Salute, J and J!). On the consumption side, the iconic official image has superseded the actual experience and use of architecture in our society of spectacles. People are sufficiently happy with what they see (mostly indirectly). Nobody would take the effort to verify the facts before believing, nor would anyone care to ask about the other side of the story behind the scene. On the production side, representation has replaced the building as the ultimate goal or final product of architecture. How to get it done? Does it actually work? Nobody cares. If people would buy the beautiful lies so easily, why bother trying to really figure it out? Competition? Well... "plans, sections, and renderings don't need to correspond - they just need to look all good." Construction? "I don't care when it really opens. Just hire a good photographer and we call it done." Here we hear a collapse of truth and responsibility.

We are blinded and we are blind. All this reminds me of horse blinders. It would actually be good if it keeps us moving forward. But piecemeal perceptions will only hold us back, or lead us to laughable ignorance...

Apollo virtues

Exactly 40 years ago (10:56pm EDT, July 20, 1969), Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon's surface. It was certainly one of the greatest moments of human history. The mission was carried out in a not only technically brilliant but morally inspiring way that seems almost inconceivable in the risk-averse world of today. Once again, I am amazed by the good old 60s - an age when dreams turned into visions, and visions led to accomplishments.

Curiosity. Men had seen the Moon shining in the sky for thousands of years. But only some wondered, "What is it made of?" "What's up there?" "What does it look like up close?" All these questions were brought together into one ambition: "What if we go there?"

Courage. Adventures suggest risks. For some people, those men were almost flying out into the vast darkness to kill themselves. There's nothing scary about the darkness itself. It's the unknown that we fear when we look upon it. But curiosity had conquered the territory of fear and courage turned the unknown into, as Buzz Aldrin described, "magnificent desolation."

Determination. RETRO? Go! FIDO? Go! Guidance? Go! Control? Go! TelCom? Go! GNC? Go! EECOM? Go! Surgeon? Go! CapCom, we're go for landing! It's exciting to hear them calling it out with firm determination. "Yes, let's do it!" Low fuel warnings? Radar data overload? That's all right - we can still do it! As JFK rightly put, "We must be bold."

Confidence. The operation was not completely smooth or flawless. At the moment of landing, Neil Armstrong realized the computer's landing target was in a boulder-strewn area just north and east of a 400 meter diameter crater. He decisively took semi-auto control and drifted forward to another spot. With full confidence, human decision overrode what technology was telling him to do.

Gratitude. No great work can be done by one man. In a TV broadcast before splashdown, Mike Collins said, "All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all of those, I would like to say, 'Thank you very much.'" Unfortunately, it doesn't seem necessary any more for the public face(s) to acknowledge the effort of those who stood behind them...

Clearly enough, all this kind of missions have political intentions (prestige in the Cold War, distraction from Vietnam, etc.). But I would just embrace it as the greatest adventure of all men and women on earth. As Neil Armstrong said himself, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The event united people of all nations, who were all gazing upon the moon with tremendous excitement. Today, 40 years later, we shall unite once again, not only to celebrate this historic moment, but to revive the endangered virtues exemplified by the epic journey.

Sausage and stuffed animal

   
There are two approaches of designing from outside in. I call them sausage and stuffed animal.

Premise
Sausage: We can certainly make the casing first. Any kind of meat can fit in this simple shape, even veggies! Who says a pig cannot be in a tube?
Stuffed animal: Cotton is great - it doesn't feel odd to be in any kind of shape. You have all the freedom to be creative about the form.

Making
Sausage: The art of filling in an a priori generic shell.
Stuffed animal: The art of sculpting for generic contents.

Flexibility
Sausage: Too much meat? Just squeeze, or make it longer - but it has to be round in section and shouldn't look too fat.
Stuffed animal: The ears have to be that exact shape and size otherwise it's out of proportion. Just get some more cotton.

Unfortunately, the content of architecture is not ground meat nor cotton. Very often it requires a certain size or implies an optimal proportion...
    

Fameism

In Marxian economics, the sole source of profit in capitalist production is the exploitation of workers - taking the surplus value of their unpaid surplus labor. Exploitation exists because of the unequal distribution of property in society. A small minority in society, the capitalists, are in possession of the majority of capital, hence the means of production (the subjects of labor, such as raw materials; and instruments of labor, such as tools and machines). The non-property-owners (the workers, proletarians) cannot survive without selling their labor-power to the capitalists (in other words, without being employed as wage laborers).

In the world of architecture, what do you need as means of production to start your own office? Very few basic instruments: a computer, some model-making tools, maybe a printer - that's it. You can probably just do it from home. But the subjects of labor is the key. You need projects to work on. But it seems right now the majority of good projects are in the hands of a minority of starchitects. It's not wealth that determines who gets the project (some interns may come from a much more loaded family than the bosses). It's fame that draws in the projects. The non-famous cannot survive without selling their labor-power to the stars. That's why the low employees have to follow the game and endure exploitation.

Fame represents the non-monetary side of power. It's the practice of control and a monopolization of decision-making. The saddest fact is, power increases with the exploitation of the workers. Just as exploitation maximizes profit in capitalism, the hard work of the lower majority expedite the growth of fame of the few in the architectural practice of fameism.

Get the demon out

I went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex for the "John Lennon: the New York City Years" exhibition last week. A quote on the wall caught my eyes:

"Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me."

- John Lennon

Clearly, music is an outlet for John Lennon - a vehicle to express himself. Society, politics, humanity... But for us architects, is architecture an outlet? At a discussion organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture, Micheal Webb asked, "everybody was making a city in the 60s, but why is nobody doing that right now?" Oh yeah, we are busy building stuff. Who cares about visions? The construction boom in the last decade made design merely a commission-based business operation... Building without substance. What about now? When there's not much work, architects just all go to the beach? We should take our social responsibilities a little more seriously. The starchitects should probably use their influence in a more active way than just trying to get the weirdest thing in the world built.

Having substance requires observation and insight. You need to absorb, process, dream, take a stance and have it voiced. I dug a little further into Lennon's quote and found that he actually went on and explained how it happens: "It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them..." I guess letting go doesn't contradict the necessity of critical observation - you have to make sure there ARE cockroaches before trying to grasp them.

What's new?

Some thoughts on innovation. Architects now crave for WOWs. They will do whatever to shock people, and call that innovation. It seems to me most of the wow factors are just being different. "Wow that's new! It's never been done before!" But does this "new" thing make any sense at all?

Innovations, by definition, are positive changes. They should make things easier and better, not just different. Think about 3D printing a cube, or CNC routing a square piece of plywood. Yes, those are new ways of making things, but do they improve efficiency? Productivity? Perhaps not even quality since the powder may come off and the plywood may get cracked by the bit. I do appreciate the value of asking "why not," but asking WHY is of equal importance, if not more.

Connections and separations

As shown in the new maps created by researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank, our world is pretty connected. You can get to the next city within 2 days from more than 90% of the land. (Not including Antarctica, I guess?)

Travel time to the closest major city

Roads

RailwaysNavigable waterways

Shipping

This is a fantastic series of maps. But when I think of it, it's hard to forget in some occasions humanity does move away from connectivity. Politics, religion, economy... There are too many driving forces of separation...