So long, and thanks for all the fish

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:10:36 -0500

Just wanted to thank everyone for all the feedback I have gotten with this podcast. Unfortunately, I am running out of hours in the day, and have decided to stop the recording of Random Abstraction. I will be disabling the e-mail address and the twitter accounts.

I still love my kindle and will probably add a few more blog entries on Random Thoughts, when I read a book I am really impressed or really dislike. So stick around.

Episode 10 - Reading Tip

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:11:55 -0400

This month I have been reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. This has been impacted by a ton of work in my day job, so I’ve shifted the review out by 1 month. Stay tuned.

Podcast On Hold

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 09:16:45 -0400

Well, my day job has been very very busy lately and I am way behind on my reading. So I am going to try and take a 1 month break to try and catch up...

Episode 9 - Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Mon, 7 Sep 2009 14:21:20 -0400

Welcome back to Random Abstractions, the monthly Kindle book review podcast. As always I review a book each month, either Science or Business, Fiction or non-Fiction, that is available on the Kindle.

This month’s book is “Hot, Flat, and Crowded”, by Thomas Friedman. I had been meaning to read this book for about a year. I had even gotten a free chapter audio book about a year ago, and never listened to it. Glad to have finally got to reading the book.

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Thomas Friedman has written many influential books over the past few years... These include “The Lexus and the Olive Branch” , “The World is Flat” and now “Hot, Flat, and Crowded”. I must say in advanced that I have not read “The Lexus and the Olive Branch”, but I have read “The World is Flat”. His books take a detailed look at many of today’s challenges and look at both the near term and long term implications of current trends.

In “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” he takes a look at climate change and the challenges and opportunities that it is causing for today’s governments and businesses. You may also call this a book about the current energy economy. I had read the book the “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan a few years back. I won’t get into the food politics, but it did open my eyes to the use of fossil fuels in our current food chain. Something I wasn’t overtly aware of. I am aware of how many of our current innovations are dependent on oil and oil byproducts. Think about the plastic case on your PC or all the plastics in your new hybrid vehicle. When we think of our current economy, it is very much driven by fossil fuels.

Mr. Friedman’s extension of this thought, is something he calls the Dirty Fuels System. Our current economy is driven by the availability of cheap fuels that are part of this system (coal and oil). One point that many people forget is that these have been cheap based on the initial subsidies that were implemented to drive exploration and exploitation of these resources. In the US alone, we still grant rights for exploration that are very valuable, but do not extract much value from them into the government coffers. I think about these subsidies and how now the energy companies are lobbying to continue to drive our current energy policy... and I compare it to companies in the software business which have a cash cow that they keep investing in, and end up missing the market for a new product. The book the “innovator’s dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen describes this problem well. The problem of changing markets, and how smart companies miss that shift.

Well, in a world that is getting Flat, Hot and Crowded, the tipping point of mandatory energy changes is coming fast. The businesses and countries which see this, and act upon it will be those that lead the next round of innovation, and capture larger profits and market share. Mr. Friedman provides multiple suggestions on how this can be accomplished. He also describes scenario’s which may play out, all of which are very interesting and thought provoking.
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I don’t know if I can say that I enjoyed this book... I like Mr. Friedman’s writing style. I really enjoy how he takes his premise and fills it out to the point that if you are not violently agreeing with him by the end of the book, you are at least willing to rethink some of your strongly held beliefs. The reason I can’t say that I necessarily enjoyed this book is, it is a scary book. Not a Steven King Scary book, but a logical treatise on how if we don’t do something soon, we can easily be doomed.

In business, companies are reluctant to change. It is very easy to keep doing, what you are doing, when things are successful. Even in a down market, if everyone else is doing badly, you can blame your business’s problems on the market or the economy and continue to do what you normally do, since you’ve been successful doing this in the past. The best way to drive change is to create an emergency. In an emergency people work together to drive change, as everyone feels that if they do nothing, you will not only get worse, but you will FAIL! You won’t survive.

Military and political planners know this lesson well, and use the policies of fear to drive for many changes in a society. Mr. Friedman brings this fear to this book. However; it is a rational fear. We know that fossil fuels are a finite resource. The scientific community is practically unanimous that global warming is not only real, but man made. The only question left is how long before we pass the tipping point on being able to impact global warming. A state of emergency, if not already here, is just around the corner.

And that is the problem... it’s around the corner in the eyes of many. The current energy cash cows out there are in a position that they want to protect their dominance. Innovation takes time. And Mr. Friedman proposes that we need a Green revolution.

I like the analogy that he uses “Code Green”. It reminds me of the Mountain Due ads for their soda - Code Red. Hopefully it will be much more successful than Code Red, and taste a lot better. The idea is that we need to transfer the entire economy around Green to the point were Green is not a relevant word. In order to start a revolution you need a catalyst.

I agree with him that we’ve had a couple of catalysts which could have driven the “code green”. The most recent being the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Had we taken this attack, which was funded by the profits that many radicals have received from the oil industry... we could have spent the last 8 years transforming instead of spending billions of dollars in Iraq protecting the same old “Dirty Fuels System”.

Having said that, this book is not a political diatribe on the problems with the gulf wars. it is a series of visions on what a Code Green society could look like. He also indicates that the best way to achieve this, is not to have a “Manhattan Project” for green, but to help a thousand innovators to create their own small gardens of invention. The more people trying to address a problem, from various different approaches, the more likely that we will achieve new solutions.

I enjoy an intellectual challenge, but I like one that drives real world changes more than one that just exercises the brain. Thomas Friedman has achieved both with this book. Since it’s publication, many companies have started talking about Smart Grid and other technologies. It is the cumulative effects of many of these changes which will keep us from the problems described in this book.... Highly recommended.

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And now for this month’s kindle moment...Given the fun and excitement of the past few months - Deleting Books / New Hardware / Changes to Amazon’s affiliate program, I really struggled finding a good kindle moment this month.

That was until blogs around the world started announcing the availability of the kindle in Europe. I find this very exciting. I showed my kindle to a few people while I was in Prague earlier this summer. They all were fascinated by the device and how easily I could buy books. The form factor and capabilities of my 1st Gen Kindle still hold up very well.

I guess the delay in providing a Kindle outside of the US has to do with multiple key factors. First we have the wireless method that you can buy books on the Kindle. This was a key factor in my getting a Kindle. The ability to carry your bookstore with you allows for quick adoption of the platform in my opinion. The impulse buy of a book, during a conversation, has the same attraction as the iPhone App store must have. It benefits both parties. I can buy books at any time, and publishers can sell books as impulse buys...even more so than firing up my web browser and using Amazon’s “1-Click” shopping.

The second aspect, which I believe delayed the availability of the Kindle, has to do with the DRM of the books. You know I am a big opponent of DRM of any kind. It is DRM which puts up barriers across companies, countries, and individuals. Prior to e-Books, publishers had defacto DRM across companies because the cost duplicate a book was high. Now with e-Books the cost to create 1 more digital copy is effectively zero. Just like the music industry had problems in the beginning of the MP3 era, publishers had to figure out how they wanted to address this for books. I believe that this is the number one reason why it has taken so long to get ebooks going.

Amazon has created a platform that is easy to use and protects the publishers control. While I support the Kindle, I see this as a necessary evil for a few more years to get the ebook market matured. At which point, I hope just like the music industry has done to break the apple monopoly on digital music with the iPod / iPhone combination, we open the market back up with no DRM. I believe that this will be the case, as publishers see the need to get on more and more devices.

Exciting times for e-Books and the Kindle

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Next month, I’ll be reviewing the book “Musicophillia” by Oliver Sacks. What books do you want to hear about? Drop me an email at randomabstractions@gmail.com. And don’t forget to keep on reading.

Episode 9 - Reading Tip

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:01:51 -0400

As mentioned in the last episode, I will be reviewing “Hot, Flat and Crowded” by Thomas Friedman. This book is about a year old, and presents a vision of how to drive “Green”. Boy that is a great simplification.