Monthly Archives: September 2010

Bill Gates on Climate Change as a priority

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I just found the “Gates Notes“, a great online resource reflecting the travels, thoughts, and priorities of Bill Gates.     You can also contact Gates from that address.

Here’s a nice piece about why Global Warming should not be a priority for the Gates Foundation:

A question from a businessman in India

You say that you want to help all people to live healthy, productive lives, but you don’t seem to be doing anything about global warming, which clearly threatens our very existence. How come you don’t care about this issue?

Bill

Energy and climate change is an issue I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about and trying to understand a bit better. I’ve been lucky enough to get time with some real experts, and there’s a lot of great stuff that’s been written that provides some understanding.

In my work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I think about energy in terms of how it can help the poorest people. If you can have cheap energy where people live, then you can have fertilizer, transportation, and clean water, along with the ability to assume that there’s electricity for a medical clinic. Among other things, that means you can keep vaccines refrigerated.

From this point of view, energy is a huge issue. Understanding how we’re going to change things so it will help the people who are the worst off is extremely important and it is a very interesting and difficult challenge.

I’m a believer that whenever markets can work, that’s where you will find the best answers because you’ll get entrepreneurs from all over the world who can pursue thousands and thousands of ideas in parallel. Depending on how you measure it, energy is probably the biggest market in the world. That means somebody can make a risky bet and try it, and you have clear metrics of success. So if you have a promising idea about sequestering carbon, or a cheap nuclear plant, or solar photovoltaic, you can get the capital to build plants, to hire people, and to demonstrate whether it works at scale.

This is perfect for the marketplace. But it’s not something any foundation should try to do. In the areas that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on, it’s where you have diseases that don’t exist in the rich world and so the research dollars aren’t there because there’s no market-driven opportunity.

Google’s 10 to the 10th project winners – spawning innovative solutions.

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Google’s  Project 10 to the 10th gathered 150,000 ideas and filtered them to five great ideas listed below.  Each will receive huge funding from Google:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Enhance science and engineering education

FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST

Make government more transparent

Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Drive innovation in public transport

Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting

Provide quality education to African students

Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to Masters and PhD study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

http://www.project10tothe100.com/

THANKS GOOGLE!

————    Joe rambles on —————-

I love the innovative spirit in contests and project like these, and also believe funding from deep pockets like Google is critical because I think in general innovations …. fail…. even in the for profit sector.     However in that sector we reward success hugely, so we get a fair number of entrepreneurial “players” who are looking to win the innovation lottery, and these players tend to spin out a few good ideas among mostly bad ones.

The current USA system tends to dramatically reward success and ruthlessly kill commercial failure, which is probably a good approach to optimize business success.  A common mistake by those who argue that “innovation is golden” is to only look at the few innovative projects that have had huge success  (Apple Computer, Google, etc) and ignore the *thousands* of failed innovations, most of which most of us never hear about.      One of the big lessons that should have been learned from the internet and real estate bubbles is that innovation does NOT foster success – it simply fosters new ideas.     Most internet companies that were spawned during the bubble have failed where a few like Google have become global economic powerhouses.

But as usual I digress.   THANKS Google for helping to spawn new ideas to do good.   That’s cool.

Global vs Personal Priorities – DON’T keep mixing them up people!

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Major breakthrough today in my confusion about why everybody gets so angry at me for suggesting the obvious – that we are pretty selfish, and than many of the concerns that today masquerade as “selfless” are in fact … selfish concerns.

My frustration and confusion stems from the fact that I know a lot of good folks really want the world to be a better place, are willing to devote time and treasure to that end, and are bright, generally rational people.    Yet I also see so many of these folks working – often as “activists” for the right or left – in ways that don’t really seem to me to be productive.    More like obsessive compulsive, and in many cases actually counterproductive, where the activism simply polarizes the debate and makes it harder to reach the compromises needed to move ahead.   (Health care reform comes to mind in this respect).

The breakthrough?    Good people are too busy trying to convince themselves that their personal priorities line up with global priorities when in reality …. they usually do NOT line up at all.     It’s this conflict that leads people to  get angry at me when I say  “hey, why not devote the time and treasure to health care in 3rd world rather than a new hospital wing or university wing in USA?”.       The reason is that folks can’t bring themselves to admit that the hospital / university donation is a more accessible kind of charity (for those of us in the wealthy world) and will have a lot more visibility and personal satisfaction for them than giving that money for a bunch of PlumpyNut or Oral Rehydration Therapy in the third world.

This, I maintain, is a moral travesty and an unconscionable state of affairs.     The return on investment by any rational measure is spectacular  with one form of giving and trivial with the other.

Opposing comments are, as always, very welcome…

Shakespeare’s Play List

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From Open Source Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s plays,
listed by number of lines

List plays by genre + alphabetically + by date

Total lines in all plays: 34,896
Total plays: 37
Average per play: 943

Note:
A “line” is either words spoken by a character, or
a stage direction — anything from a one-word shout
to a full soliloquy.
Lines Play Genre
1,361 Antony and Cleopatra Tragedy
1,309 Othello Tragedy
1,301 Troilus and Cressida Tragedy
1,250 Hamlet Tragedy
1,240 Coriolanus Tragedy
1,224 Richard III History
1,181 King Lear Tragedy
1,163 Merry Wives of Windsor Comedy
1,123 Love’s Labour’s Lost Comedy
1,062 Much Ado about Nothing Comedy
1,034 All’s Well That Ends Well Comedy
1,031 Twelfth Night Comedy
990 Romeo and Juliet Tragedy
987 Henry IV, Part II History
987 Measure for Measure Comedy
979 Cymbeline History
965 Taming of the Shrew Comedy
949 Henry VI, Part III History
943 Two Gentlemen of Verona Comedy
921 Henry VI, Part II History
895 Julius Caesar Tragedy
884 Henry IV, Part I History
872 As You Like It Comedy
870 Timon of Athens Tragedy
853 Henry V History
814 Winter’s Tale Comedy
788 Henry VIII History
787 Henry VI, Part I History
765 Macbeth Tragedy
756 Pericles History
722 Merchant of Venice Comedy
702 Tempest Comedy
664 Comedy of Errors Comedy
662 Titus Andronicus Tragedy
636 Richard II History
621 King John History
605 Midsummer Night’s Dream Comedy

Cuba and the Human Development Index

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Cuba’s economic failures are now in the spotlight as they finally realize they need to change their socialist nightmare economy into something more … sustainable.    But Cuba’s problems are too often cited without a recognition of the success they have had in health care and education and poverty reduction.      This has come at what most would say is a serious expense in terms of personal freedoms, economic, and especially political freedom.   However it is important to note that on the best measure of overall “well being”, Cuba ranks 51st of all the countries.

Now, if we can only get all the fake conservatives to stop supporting the embargo which is a violation of free trade principles we *REAL* conservatives hold dear, maybe the good folks in Cuba can get cracking on the sustained and sustainable economic progress they so richly deserve.

More about the HDI:

The UN’s Human Development Index
From WikiPedia:

The HDI combines three dimensions:

Feeling Good vs Doing Good

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It seems these days I’m often pissing off friends and family for suggesting something that, frankly, is pretty obvious.     Most of what passes as “doing good” these days are activities that make the feel-gooders feel good about themselves, their community, and life in general (that’s fine of course), but don’t do much to make the world a better place.    It’s fine to engage in things that you enjoy that do not contribute to the greater good, but it is very important to recognize the difference, and not to conflate feel-good stuff with actual do-good stuff.

Real good comes in many forms, and thank goodness their are a LOT of people doing real good all around us.  Friends and neighbors working and volunteering in health care, teaching, law enforcement, and hundreds of other public service jobs,  NGOs  building schools all over,  Church groups teaching, etc, etc.    Many of the folks doing that stuff are heroic, braving all kinds of bad conditions to bring health care, education, food, and good will to those who need it most.

But without even pointing out those obvious ‘feel good’ activities I’m going to hope we make better progress than we seem to be *re-defining* what it means to “do good”.

Those of us in the middle and up classes here in the USA enjoy historically unprecedented standards of living, and even those on welfare here in the USA live well by any reasonable global standards.    Bringing this higher *standard of living* to the small numbers in the US and the huge numbers in other countries who do not benefit from our system is the greatest moral challenge of our time, yet I can’t help but think that the many “feel gooders” (and even worse – the political spenders on both sides of the political aisle) are distracting us and redirecting resources very inefficiently to projects that will have little significant positive impact.

As always, hoping folks chime in with their views about this, and for what it’s worse I’d agree that blogging is probably NOT an example of doing much if any good!     Maybe I’m my own best example of the problem?

104 Wagner Street, Talent, For Sale

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Hello and thanks for asking about the Historic Wagner Street House in Talent, Oregon right across from the post office.     The lot size is about 11,000 square feet and the house is a 2 bedroom one bath craftsman built about 1911.   There is also a large shed on the lot.

This was the residence of one of Talent’s early families and I was told that they ran a pole making operation across the street at what is now the Talent Post Office, turning logs into poles that were loaded onto the train.

House Details coming soon.

This is one of Talent’s best commercial locations although it’s currently zoned for “mixed use” or residential, which means that you could run a business and live there.    Any  sale can be made contingent on rezoning the large lot as commercial – in the past the planning department indicated this would probably be acceptable depending on the commercial use that is planned.

Many basic repairs are needed to restore the house to it’s historical beauty.   I’m hoping to have most of those completed in Spring of 2011, I’m planning to ask  for $265,000 when those are done.  I can offer excellent owner financing options with a modest down payment.    I’ll consider lower offers for the house in “as is” condition but please don’t send me lowball offers – I’m not in a hurry to sell this house.   This is a great mixed use / business location in one of Oregon’s most wonderful cities and the right buyer will come along eventually.

I’ll be posting more information here as the remodel continues, but also feel free to email me jhunkins@gmail.com or  call me at 541-324-4800 or 541-535-7640

…. to be continued …

Got Travel Content ?

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The rumors are true – this quirky site, basically created without much human intervention, is now online: 004Travel.com

One of my business partners and I are discussing the importance of “content” in terms of online empires. I’m experimenting with a new Godaddy service that actually builds a site for you and loads it with articles from around the web based on keywords you select. The cost is extremely cheap – 8 per site one time charge and far less in bulk. It’s a VERY interesting concept that really begins to blur the distinctions between super junky “auto generated” material and “real” but sort of “canned” material that is actually somewhat relevant for some readers.

Google generally frowns (reasonably) on irrelevant content that simply tries to optimize for valuable keywords, but they have always struggled (sometimes unreasonably due to non-transparency) with relevant content that is manipulative of their algorithm. It’ll be interesting to see how the amazing Googlebot treats 004Travel.com , a Godaddy auto-generated site using keywords like “Travel” and “Twitter”.

One humorous side of this is an article about “Time Travel”.

Obviously users are not served if their search takes them to irrelevant content, but much of this is “fair” content by my definition – certainly better than much of the stuff provided by the millions of sites that have no intention whatsoever of providing good material to users. Yes, that’s something of a rationalization here because I love the idea of creating fairly robust relevant websites for a few dollars. Let’s see what happens, OK?!

Brain Test

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This just in from the “Quirky Internet Tricks” Department.

Update:  Fun but fails for most!

It’s fun and only takes a moment, so please try and let me know the result in the comments.

Begin the test …..

At the end of this message, you are asked a question.
Answer it immediately …
Don’t stop and think about it.

Just say the first thing that pops into your mind.
This is a fun ‘test’ …

See if you are among the 98% or the 2%. You’ll understand what that means after you finish taking the ‘test…’ Now – just follow the instructions as quickly as possible.

Do not go to the next calculation before you have finished the previous one …

You do not ever need to write or remember the answers, just do it using your mind..

You’ll be surprised..

Start:   How much is: 15 + 6
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21

3 + 56
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59

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89 + 2

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91

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12 + 53

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65
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75 + 26
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101
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25 + 52
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77
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* 63 + 32

95

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I know! Calculations are hard work,

but it’s nearly over..

Come on, one more! ….

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123 + 5

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128

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QUICK! THINK ABOUT
A COLOR AND A TOOL!
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Scroll further to the bottom….
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A bit more…

‘
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You just thought about a red hammer, didn’t you?
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Discussion of this trick:
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Urban-Legends-3056/2008/2/2-98-red-hammer.htm