hegemonicon

>Twitter is a medium (as in new form of media)

That's crap.

All this talk about twitter as a medium, twitter as revolutionizing communication, twitter as a service conveniently ignores the fact that twitter is a BUSINESS. It's purpose is to make money. Everything it does is subordinate to that goal. Maybe this wouldn't be true if it was just the founder's fun project, but it's not - they took tons and tons of VC money, invested on the assumption that they would be turning a profit. It doesn't matter how popular they are, or how many viewers they have if they can't leverage that into turning a profit.

In the words of Musashi - "The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."

It makes absolutely no difference how popular or revolutionary you are if it doesn't make you any money.

And while in pre-internet times, when viewers translated directly into dollars (which is why it's got such high valuation), it would be a safe assumption that it will, it's far from clear that the same rule applies today. There's many huge services that aren't profitable because no one's figured out how to make money off of them yet. Saying something like "I have no doubt twitter will do very, very well" seems unjustified given the fickle nature of internet users and the fact that the rules for building a profitable online service are more alchemical than scientific at this point.

I great interpretation of Malcolm Gladwell's 10000 hours that I came across somewhere is "Don't be concerned with practicing 10000 hours at something - be concerned with finding something you enjoy so much that you don't notice when the 10000 hours have passed"

Given that our brains are hard-wired to find patterns, I'll bet this also makes us more likely to "find" them where none exist.

See: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/11/its_one_of_the_more.p...

Knowing what to work on is certainly more important than trying to brute force all problems with man hours, but unless you've spent hours and hours of hard work learning your field, you won't KNOW what to work on.

The only reason the Caterina people knew what to work on this time is because of the hundreds of hours of experience they got building flickr.

The importance of hard work to success is extremely well documented: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/...

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/05/13/success-motivation/

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_col...

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...

Worth pointing out that fly ash is already widely used in the concrete industry for the same reasons - it's more environmentally friendly. Using it actually gives a building extra LEED points.

Fly ash can replace up to 50% of the cement needed in concrete - saying that 'there's no proof it will last' seems fairly ridiculous.

According to the blog post the pages made were all "samples", presumably to demonstrate the service. Fairly shifty, but now that they're taken down and the only way to get one is by request, there doesn't seem to be much to complain about.

This seems like alot to pay for a company that's raised funding twice before and still isn't anything resembling profitable.

China doesn't own them all - it can just produce them the cheapest (like it does everything else). From the 2nd page of the article:

'"So there really is no shortage in rare elements, and in fact, there are enough deposits out there to easily fill demand, but at a price," he said.

At least until now, rare-earth production was not very economical, but if prices stay high, we will see many new mines outside of China, he said.'

More on our overconfidence bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect

and it's twin brother, certanity bias: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/10/the_certainty_bias_1....

The human brain just isn't built to handle probabilities very well.

His work seems closely related to the concept of 'locus of control', a pretty well-studied area of psychology. People with an internal locus of control tend to be healther/more successful than those with an external locus of control.

Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

Expecting perfection is unreasonable - everything has a failure rate. The question is what's an acceptable percentage of false positives.

When Cortez burned his ships when he came to America, it was to give his men a choice between following him and certain death - failure wasn't an option.

Fear can be a powerful motivator. Of course, if things go wrong, you end up murdered by massive armies of Indians. Or something.

Though the source escapes me, the best advice I've come across for avoiding this (and for living your life in general) was to the effect of "construct your life to fit you so perfectly that it's utterly incomparable with anyone elses."

They seem to be going about the same task in two different ways. Alpha is built essentially by having an army of experts massage the data, and input it to a specially designed database. My guess is google will just apply what it knows about search to its newly available data, without messing around with it.

I'm suspicious of Alpha's ability to live up to its hype, unless there's significantly more to its inner workings than I'm aware of. It almost seems like a brute force solution to the problem.