It Burns! It Burns!

If Jobs’s time in exile can be seen as an extended trip through business school, the heady start of NeXT represents those early days when a student thinks he knows everything and is in a rush to show that to the world. In fact, Jobs had just about every detail wrong. The Open Corporation was a dismal failure in practice. Its hallmark was that employee salaries were not kept secret; there was even an attempt to impose uniform compensation. It didn’t work, of course; all kinds of side deals were cut to satiate key employees.

More concretely, Jobs had the whole business plan wrong. It would be two years before NeXT delivered anything to customers. When the NeXTcube computer finally did arrive, it proved too expensive to ever command a serious market. Ultimately, Jobs was forced to admit that the undeniably beautiful machine he and his engineering team concocted was a flop. He laid off most of the staff and turned the company from hardware to software, first to rewrite NeXT’s operating system, called NextSTEP, for Intel-based computers. The company also engineered an ingenious development environment called WebObjects, which eventually became its best-selling program.

Jobs didn’t know that WebObjects would later prove instrumental in building the online store for Apple and for iTunes, or that NextSTEP would be his ticket back to Apple. The road for NeXT was always rocky, perhaps appropriate for something that was born out of a desire for revenge. It was a good thing he had something else going on the side.

Back when Larry Summers was through here in April, he meditated on the fact that a TV set today costs 1/50 of what one cost back when he was born but that a day in the hospital costs 50 times as much. How much of the declining tolerance of upper-middle class opinion leaders to tax themselves for the benefit of equal opportunity and a Great Society comes from the fact that they regard themselves as poorer than they should be—that they have cheap air travel and immense amounts of electronic and media toys, but houses are really expensive and traffic is awful. I know that, adjusted for inflation, I just paid 50% more for a house half the size and twice the commuting time from downtown SF than the house I grew up in was in DC—that’s a factor of six tims as expensive.

Dammit, I consume medical services, but not TV! I’m not doing this right.

While other Westerners had certainly noticed that the Inuit thrived despite their lack of access to antiscorbutics such as citrus fruits or cabbage, Cook was the first to realise that their secret lay in eating fresh meat, raw or lightly cooked, rather than the canned fish balls and sausage hashes with which the Belgica was provisioned.

This is how they procured said fresh meat:

Smith’s post explores the curious method the crew of the Belgica developed to hunt the poor birds: playing a tune on the ship’s cornet to lure them in, and then seizing them alive. The image this conjures up, of a sponge-gummed, half-mad sailor playing the cornet on an ice-bound boat in the dark, as penguins gather round solemnly to listen, is almost unbearably sad and strange.

I recently stumbled on Edible Geography, a wonky blog about food and science, and it is fantastic.

In mating experiments, yogurt-eating males inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring than control mice. Conversely, females that ate the yogurt diets gave birth to larger litters and weaned those pups with greater success. Reflecting on their unpublished results, Erdman and Alm think that the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier, which indirectly improves sexual machismo.

via Nicola Twilley

I’m all in favor of investment strategies which display low-volatility returns, but only when those returns are actually positive; in reality, according to this report, the average VC fund returns less money to investors than they invested in the first place.

And:

Given the high fees and the illiquidity and the inherent risks of venture-capital investing (the Russell 2000 can’t go to zero, a venture fund can), it’s reasonable to expect a venture fund to return at least 3% per year over and above the Russell 2000. Using that metric, 78% of the funds that Kauffman invested in have failed. And remember that Kauffman has more access to the top-tier firms than most VC investors.