silencematters

A running list of assumptions about the future.

A running list of blogs that I find compelling enough to subscribe to, read and share.

Tony Schwartz is a perfect examples of a life lived under the influence of curiosity and wonder, and I want to be reminded of his work on a daily basis.

Beginning in the 1940s, Tony Schwartz made tens of thousands of recordings of the sounds and people of New York City. Schwartz’s “endangered sounds” were included in numerous WNYC radio broadbcasts and record albums over the years

Sam Roberts on City Room has a really outstanding post that helps to detail more of the accomplishments and cultural impact that Tony Schwartz had on media and telling stories with sound.

Mr. Schwartz recorded tour guides, singing children, fire engines, fog horns, merry-go-round calliopes, cabbies and other urban folkloric sounds that produced the city’s collective voice now archived at the Library of Congress and collected in his albums. He defined the sound of speech as “the body language of the written word.”

You can see and hear more of Tony’s work in a retrospective this Wednesday:

Mr. Schwartz’s advertisements, 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialogues that he recorded, along with his 27 years of radio programs on WNYC and WBAI will be the subject of a retrospective Wednesday at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress will conduct an illustrated exploration of “Tony Schwartz and the Sounds of His City.”

It is October and the first snow has arrived over Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Joe Nocera’s column today, “We Can All Become Job Creators”, is must read:

Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1.

And here’s how it will work – (more…)

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via @moorehn and The Daily Bail

I was one of the fortunate few to purchase a three-day pass to Brooklyn Beta, an intentionally small web conference with a considerably large following. It is the second year that Brooklyn Beta has run. Last year they ran it for a single day, and it drew so much attention from entrepreneurs, designers, developers and speakers from around the globe that they decided to run it for three days this year.

Over the next few days, I will be compiling notes here about the conference, the people I meet and what the ideas being shared at Brooklyn Beta say about the way we live, work and create today. (more…)

The New York Times Magazine published a great list of well-known people talking about memorable or life-changing educational experiences they’ve had.

I like the writing and find it inspiring, but what I like more than that is that the idea itself. I feel like I too have had many influential educational experiences, and that mine are worth writing down, though not because I really want to share them with others, but because I want to remember them, describe them and learn from those experiences. I am saving this idea for a future blog post. (more…)

Kepler is only 2yrs old, but today is his first day of School.
He starts today at Maple Street School, a pre-school in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.

I have been loving this app called MailTab.

I don’t check my personal g-mail as much as I do my work mail all that often, but when I do, it is right there, one key command away. And when open, it responds to all of Gmail’s existing key commands. The window is also size-able.

I really thought I would find an app like this annoying, but actually, it is proving to be really great a being available when you want it, and getting out of the way the second you don’t need it. Isn’t that a quality that you would like to see with more apps?

First read the excerpt on “How Short Selling Works” that guys over at The Awl pulled out.:

“Short-selling is on the decent-sized list of practices which seem bizarre to civilians but to insiders are a routine feature of how modern markets work. A short-seller borrows shares in a company, and then sells them, with the intention of buying them back at a cheaper price, returning them to the lender, and trousering the profit. Say you decide that, to take one purely hypothetical example, News Corp is overvalued because – oh, I don’t know, just to make something up – because all its senior management are going to go to jail. The current price is $15.80 and you reckon it’s heading for ten bucks. So you find a willing lender, borrow one million shares with an agreement to return them on a specific date, and then you sell them. Notice that this selling is not a neutral event: by dumping $15.8 million of News Corp stock you actively help to drive prices down. Critics of short-selling point out that this shades into a form of market manipulation, which is illegal. A short-seller isn’t just betting on an outcome, he (it’s usually a he) is trying to bring it about. Anyway, some months pass, the News Corp execs are charged with multiple malfeasances, the stock tanks to $10, you buy back the million shares – this is called ‘covering the short’ – and give them back to the lender.”

But if you read the full piece from John Lanchester in the London Review of Books – and you should – you’ll notice among many things the wonderful footnote that extends the description of short selling with an example of it can go wrong:

I make this ‘covering’ sound routine, but it isn’t, and can go horribly wrong – wherein lies much of the risk in shorting shares. In 2005, Porsche began to buy shares in Volkswagen (I know that sounds the wrong way around), to help it ward off a foreign takeover. They kept buying shares over the next three years, and as they did so the share price rose. As it did so, the remaining Volkswagen shares, obviously, kept becoming more expensive, so it became clear that Porsche wouldn’t be able to afford to buy all the rest of them and take full control of the target company. At the same time, prospects weakened for the global car industry. The hedge funders took out their crystal balls and concluded that this meant Porsche would stop buying shares, and so the share price would fall, and they began to short Volkswagen stock. So far, so routine. But what they didn’t know was that Porsche was secretly using Germany’s not so transparent rules to accumulate more and more shares, until 26 October 2008, when Porsche announced that it now owned 75 per cent of Volkswagen, i.e. pretty much all the publicly tradeable stock – most of the rest was, for various reasons, locked up in places where it couldn’t be sold. At which point, the hedge funds shat themselves. Remember, all those shorted shares were borrowed, and had to be bought back and then returned – but where were the hedge funds going to buy the shares to return them, since there was now no stock on the market? Answer: they’d have to pay whatever the seller wanted to charge. In 48 hours, Volkswagen’s share price went from €200 to more than €1000. Hedge funds lost £24 billion betting against Volkswagen and Germany’s fifth richest man, Adolf Merckle (b. 1934, cement, pharmaceuticals), threw himself under a train.

Short selling aside, Lanchester depicts the downward spiral that we are headed down better than any one I have read yet. And yes, this is a downward spiral. As he notes near the end, “It’s starting to look as if the best-case scenario for the aftermath of the crash is already dead.”

It is time to break out all the advice columns and top 10 tips for living through and surviving depressing the depressing times ahead. The worst is not behind us.

Kim Pimmel explores the structure and nature of soap bubbles, exotic ferrofluid liquid, a magnet and food coloring with minimal editing to highlight the under-appreciated structure of bubbles.

Compressed 02 from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

What is the nature of identity online, and under what circumstances can one’s identity thrive, grow and add value — to both the community and person associated with the identity, private or public?

I pick up a lot of interesting books in a year. Most of them I find on the free book tables here at the Times or if I am lucky, and editor will pass along something that is worth reading.

Most of the books I pick up are nonfiction, of which I read through the first few chapters or until the author starts to repeat themselves. Obviously, if the book is really good, I keep going.

A few years ago, I came up with a simple rule:

Only pick up a book that you’ve seen or heard about three times.

This keeps me from having too many books that I dont read, and it keeps down the urge to hoard good books for the sake of having good books around that I never end up reading. I figured that if I have seen a book three times, or I have heard people talk about a book on three separate occasions, I am very likely to be very interested in reading the book and can better assess if I have the time to read at least the first two chapters.

Not all of the books I pick up are passed by this rule. Some are bought on first sight. These are usually books that strike a chord in me or are so inline with what I am working on that it would be stupid of me to not buy the book at that very moment.

So I have decided to start making a list, not of all the books that I read in a year, but of the ones that are worth talking about or linking to.

Every time it is someone’s birthday, or someone is going away, getting married, etc… I have to search the city looking for the best places to get a cake, cupcakes, pie, or sweets. This time, I am going to write it down to remember it.

The subtle craft of linking to other sites within writing these days needs a closer examination. Good examples need to be drawn out and shared. Writing on the subject of linking needs to be scrutinized and picked apart. This is a growing list.