EclecticLip

I went to a Comicon last weekend, scouting out artists to adapt my samurai play into a graphic novel. There are two things I took away from that event:

1. I finally met someone whose brother was named “Thor”

2. I found out that it takes 8+ hours (!) for a professional illustrator to draw a single page of today’s typical Western superhero comics. This does include time spent doing the layout — but wow!

I asked a manga artist about the same thing, and was told six hours was typical!
…so, I did not at all appreciate how much work goes into a monthly, 20-odd page comic, and can only imagine how manga artists go through, to churn out 20 pages a week. (Specifically, I’m imagining a huge entourage of assistants…)

On a whim, I checked my iTunes library to see if the Pareto principle held.

Of the 2114 playlist items — with a playcount of 34523…
…the top 20% (425 items) were played 25691 times, or 74.4%.

So, Pareto holds!

All in all, not bad for a guy burdened by the name Vilfredo…

I probably first came across von Neumann machines in the novel version of 2010. (From what I’m told, the movie version was as poorly received a sequel, as The Matrix Reloaded.)

Self-replicating machines seem a long ways away still, for better or worse. At least, apart from the biological ones. Like us.

This story stunned me.

I previously figured Macs would have the same market share across all price points. Of course, on further reflection Apple doesn’t make “budget” computers. (And that’s a good strategy for keeping margins healthy.) All of its market share is probably in the >$1000 category.

I think this is a turning point in the personal computer market. (And I’m probably one of the slower ones on the uptake here…) It suggests that prices and performance have reached the point where design is starting to matter.

To draw an automotive analogy: in the 1920’s, Ford kept making the Model T cheaper and cheaper. But GM started refreshing their models each year, and positioned their cars at all price points (hence Sloan’s expression “a car for every purse and purpose”.)

As a result, GM cars became the ones people wanted to buy; that’s probably one of the many reasons GM wound up replacing Ford as the world’s #1 automaker.

PC manufacturers have competed largely on price in the past couple decades — whether price for a basic model, or price for the premium model. Perhaps the product is mature enough now, that design becomes a big differentiator. To draw again from the automotive sector, design is probably the main reason that the Nissan of the 2000’s has been healthily profitable while the Nissan of the 1990’s tumbled towards bankruptcy.

Through LATOC, I found this Guardian story about one of Bayer’s pesticides being linked to honeybee die-offs.

Which I guess means that the bees are the “collateral damage” of pesticide use.

There might even be a “blowback” analogue too, if pesticide-linked honeybee die-offs ultimately reduce crop yields through reduced pollination.

Seems to me, the endgame for GHG-free electric power generation will be:

• geothermal for baseline power
• solar thermal to handle the brunt of peak daytime loads (nice intro here)
• PV solar for local distributed power (as per the “smart grid” or Al-Gore-coined “electranet”)

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Couldn’t help smiling on noticing that one of the books I’m decluttering, is called Inner Simplicity.

Kinda cool that the Stanley Cup was yesterday’s featured Wikipedia frontpage article.  Cooler still for my Pens-won’t-win theory, the thumping that the Wings delivered.

A couple days ago, I had my first CFL burn out.

I plan to switch to LED lighting once we run through our suppy of CFL’s (I got a bit overeager, so we’ve got two spare CFL’s to go through before we buy new lights). While there are still a few hurdles price-wise*, I think LED lighting will start penetrating the consumer lighting market in the next decade.

According to this Washington Post article last year, CFL’s had 80% of the Japanese residential market, 50% in Germany, 20% in the UK… and 6% of the US market. With energy prices continually going up, and solid-state (LED) lighting representing longer-life So I think LED’s could reach 10% of the market. Especially given their advantages over CFL’s:

• longer expected life: 50-60,000 hours vs. 10-20,000 hours
• up to 50x as efficient as incandescents (CFL’s are up to 5x as efficient)
• the fact they’re “dimmable”

Sources for the above: here, here, here.

- - - - -

This got me wondering whether CFL’s are doomed to be the Zip drives of the lighting market. Though they represented a quantum improvement over 3.5″ floppies, Zip drives were soon displaced by CD’s, which could store more data, cheaper.

Similarly, though CFL’s represent a huge improvement over incandescent light bulbs — which should really be called ‘heat bulbs’ because they produce 90% heat and 10% light — I think they themselves will be displaced by solid-state / LED lighting, in relatively short order.

——

* hat-tip to Brian Piccioni’s “The Geek’s Weekly Reading List”

By my reckoning, the Wings will beat the Pens in the Stanley Cup finals.

This is because emerging teams generally have at least one huge heartbreak before winning. The Pens (12-2 in the playoffs so far) make me think of the ‘83 Oilers, who were 11-1 going into the Finals. Where they got swept, 4-0, by the Islander dynasty.
Like the ‘82-’83 Oilers, the Pens are coming off their second strong year — with core players who lack experience in the Finals. And like the ‘82 Oilers, the ‘07 Pens got knocked out in the first round.
Similar cases would be:

• ‘07 Ducks: won after a trip to the Finals in ‘03
• ‘06 Hurricanes: won after a trip in ‘02 (though admittedly the ‘06 Oilers were hardly a powerhouse)
• ‘97 Wings: won after a Finals loss in ‘95, and after being upset in ‘96 by Colorado
• ‘95 Devils: won after losing a heartbreaker in ‘94 to the Rangers in the semis
• the aforementioned Oilers (choked in the first round in ‘82, swept in the ‘83 Finals)
• the Islanders, who before their dynasty, had a reputation for perennially choking

It isn’t a scientific law, of course, that powerhouse teams have to lose once before winning. The ‘91 Penguins and ‘96 Avalanche won, their first time out. But they were playing relatively weaker teams. Ditto for the ‘04 Lightning and the ‘99 Stars.

Since the Red Wings lineup has a lot more Finals experience than the Pens, I figure that odds are, this time around, age and experience will beat youth and exuberance. We’ll see how it turns out.