Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen & W+K

Congrats to W+K for adding a nice visual and aural layer to one of my favorite poems:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Charles Bukowski



Goes nicely with a favorite lyrics of mine:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

NYT: Great interview with a Chinese VC

Easily on of the best interviews I've seen in a while.

NYTM: Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From? Emergence

via

Tarn Adams was in the carpeted spare bedroom that serves as his work space, trying to avert an apocalyptic outbreak of vampire dwarves. “If they just run wild biting people, half the dwarves in the colony will be infected in no time,” he said, shaking his head. “That would be no fun.” He was silent for a moment. “Maybe they have to bite you three times before you’re infected?”

Seated nearby was Tarn’s older brother, Zach, squinting thoughtfully and jotting ideas into a notepad. It was a chilly afternoon in Silverdale, Wash., a town about 20 miles west of Seattle, and Tarn was wearing one of his favorite sweatshirts, a beige hoodie decorated with rows of strutting cats. The brothers — both heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and sweetly sheepish demeanors — were conversing, as they do every day, about Dwarf Fortress, the computer game they began devising in 2002.

Dwarf Fortress is barely a blip on the mainstream radar, but it’s an object of intense cult adoration. Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem — in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin. The goal, in the game’s main mode, is to build as much and as imaginatively as possible before some calamity — stampeding elephants, famine, vampire dwarves — wipes you out for good.

Though its medieval milieu of besieged castles and mutant enemies may be familiar, Dwarf Fortress appeals mainly to a substratum of hard-core gamers. The game’s unofficial slogan, recited on message boards, is “Losing is fun!” Dwarf Fortress’s unique difficulty begins with its most striking feature: The way it looks. In an industry obsessed with pushing the frontiers of visual awe, Dwarf Fortress is a defiant throwback, its interface a dense tapestry of letters, numbers and crude glyphs you might have seen in a computer game around 1980. A normal person looks at ♠§dg and sees gibberish, but the Dwarf Fortress initiate sees a tense tableau: a dog leashed to a tree, about to be mauled by a goblin.

This bare-bones aesthetic allows Tarn to focus resources not on graphics but on mechanics, which he values much more. Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress. Beneath the game’s rudimentary facade is a dizzying array of moving parts, algorithms that model everything from dwarves’ personalities (some are depressive; many appreciate art) to the climate and economic patterns of the simulated world. The story of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand — in most games narratives progress along an essentially set path — but, rather, generated on the fly by a multitude of variables. The brothers themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.

“Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,” says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. And, he added, “flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.”

Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. “I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,” Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but “that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.”

Keep reading at NYTM

Shearing Layers. Thank you Frank Duffy.

Shearing layers is a concept coined by architect Frank Duffy which was later elaborated by Stewart Brand in his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Brand, 1994), and refers to buildings as composed of several layers of change.

The concept is based on the work of ecologists (O’Neill et al., 1985) and systems theorists (Salthe, 1993). The idea is that there are processes in nature, which operate in different timescales and as a result there is little or no exchange of energy/mass/information between them. Brand transferred this intuition to buildings and noticed that traditional buildings were able to adapt because they allowed “slippage” of layers: i.e. faster layers (services) were not obstructed by slower ones (structure).

The concept of Shearing Layers leads to an architectural design principle, known as Pace-Layering, which arranges the layers to allow for maximum adaptability.

The Shearing layers concept views buildings as a set of components that evolve in different timescales; Frank Duffy summarized this view in his phrase: “Our basic argument is that there isn't any such thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components” (quoted in (Brand, 1994)).
The layers are (quoted from Brand, 1994):

Site
This is the geographical setting, the urban location, and the legally defined lot, whose boundaries and context outlast generations of ephemeral buildings. "Site is eternal." Duffy agrees.

Structure
The foundation and load-bearing elements are perilous and expensive to change, so people don't. These are the building. Structural life ranges from thirty to three hundred years (but few buildings make it past sixty for other reasons).

Skin
Exterior surfaces now change every twenty years or so, to keep up with fashion or technology, or for wholesale repair. Recent focus on energy costs has led to re-engineered skins that are air-tight and better-insulated.

Services
These are the working guts of a building: communications wiring, electrical wiring, plumbing, fire sprinkler systems, HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning), and moving parts like elevators and escalators. They wear out or obsolesce every seven to fifteen years. Many buildings are demolished early if their outdated systems are too deeply embedded to replace easily.

Space Plan
The Interior layout—where walls, ceilings, floors, and doors go. Turbulent commercial space can change every three years or. so; exceptionally quiet homes might wait thirty years.

Stuff
Chairs, desks, phones, pictures; kitchen appliances, lamps, hairbrushes; all the things that twitch around daily to monthly. Furniture is called mobilia in Italian for good reason.

via

Difference between advertisers and Designers

Advertisers are "mercenaries." Designers are missionaries [2] [3] [4] [5].

Power to the Edge

Network-centric warfare, now commonly called network-centric operations, is a new military doctrine or theory of war pioneered by the United States Department of Defense.

It seeks to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the robust networking of well informed geographically dispersed forces. This networking, combined with changes in technology, organization, processes, and people - may allow new forms of organizational behavior.

Specifically, the theory contains the following four tenets in its hypotheses:

1. A robustly networked force improves information sharing;
2. Information sharing enhances the quality of information and shared situational awareness;
3. Shared situational awareness enables collaboration and self-synchronization, and enhances sustainability and speed of command; and
4. These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness.

P&G discovers the power of distributed leadership, fires many top execs

With not a little pride, Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonaldand Filippo Passerini, his CIO, told Fortune Brainstormconference attendees that digital investment had successfully transformed their company's transparency and agility. New networks and innovative analytics gave top management greater visibility into Procter's people, processes, and anticipated profits. These technologies were making the world's biggest consumer products firm quicker, nimbler, and more responsive.

I couldn't help myself. At virtually all the larger companies I knew, increased transparency and visibility empowered hard-charging executives to increasingly meddle and micromanage. The more just-in-time information top management could access, the more actively inclined they were to "help" their subordinates. So I grabbed a microphone and asked McDonald how P&G — a company famous for its buttoned-down, control-oriented culture — minimized the techno-temptation to micromanage. Did he simply tell people not to micromanage?

McDonald's blunt answer surprised me. No denial. No boilerplate. No managerially-correct rhetoric on the importance of delegation. "We have fewer top managers now," he said. P&G's CEO reduced his company's network-enabled propensity to meddle by cutting the number of top executives whocould meddle. In his P&G, effective leaders should be too busy to micromanage. "You dismantle the hierarchy so people don't have time to micromanage," McDonald declared.

That's contrary to net-centric clichés emphasizing how digital technologies hollow out middle management. McDonald's P&G sliced from the pyramid's peak. In agile enterprises, he suggested, increased transparency delayers top management. If leadership consistently uses networks to micromanage people and processes, then the firm probably has too many leaders. Increasing visibility and information flow should lead to reducing executive head counts. This isn't about consolidating power; it's about assuring that decision-making really does get pushed more deeply into the enterprise.

Micromanagement pathologies distort a key visibility virtue which P&G's technology investments were designed to foster. McDonald and Passerini both emphasized that increased internal visibility was intended to promote greater information sharing across P&G, not just vertically. Of course, McDonald noted that cross-functional transparency and novel analytics demanded behavioral shifts in P&G culture. Greater digital transparency, they argued, was making P&G a more "democratic" company.

Whether that's the perception inside of P&G would be fascinating to know. But the view from the top is that while technology may generate a demand for more leadership throughout the company, it doesn't require more executives.

But the insight that technology should drive downsizing at the top deserves special emphasis. Too many companies see greater transparency and visibility as opportunities to super-empower their executive teams. They perceive the ability to better and more immediately micromanage as a special "feature," not an organizational and economic "bug." By contrast, P&G is so concerned about micomanagerial meddling that it's delayering from top to bottom. It sees micromanagement as anti-democratic.

via