Our World, via the Times

It's earth day; here's a quick look at our world.

World Pool
Bracketolitics: The Road to the Final Four: Gregg Easterbrook and Grady White put together a funny NCCA-inspired bracket in the Times; although they wimp out by not picking a championship game (Hillary vs. U.S. military) or winner (ground troops always win).

When Little Girls Grow Up
Condoleezza Rice on PianoThe Times magazine: The talk of Condi vs. Hillary in 2008 sounds a lot less crazy after you read this profile. She's amazing... one of those you can't believe she can do all that she does in so many different areas type people.

One paragraph jumped out at me:

Ms. Rice, not quite 9, was sitting in her father's church on the Sunday morning in 1963 when, two miles away, bombs went off at a Baptist church and four black girls were killed, one of them a childhood playmate of hers. During this period of protests, fire hoses and bombs in Birmingham, she found comfort taking music classes at a local conservatory that had boldly opened its doors to black children. In 1969, the family moved to Denver, and Ms. Rice, having skipped the first and seventh grades, entered the University of Denver at 15 as a music major.

It's a juxtaposition that reminds you it wasn't that long ago when Rice could've been beaten with near-impunity in some parts of this country. Times have changed; not sure everyone has, but if nothing else they're dying off.

Why Bloomberg's a billionaire
Echoes of Lucy

The City Column--Q: When I think of Mayor Bloomberg, I think of a line he occasionally uses: "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it." That sounds just like him. Did he originate the line?

A. You're going to love this. That aphorism is most commonly attributed to Lucille Ball (1911-1989), another famously organized overachiever. The complete quotation is: "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do."

But it is doubtful that Lucy originated it. Here is a similar quote from William Hazlitt (1778-1830), a British essayist: "The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are the more leisure we have."

Maybe this explains Condi. And people like Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, Yo Yo Ma, Richard Posner....

Can you Ear Me Now?
Ready for the Red Baron

The Times: Dogs are famously blessed with acute hearing, a trait that serves them well when guarding warehouses or sensing when Kibbles 'n Bits are poured into a bowl. But that hearing may be overwhelmed when a dog is taken aloft in a private plane, as Michele McGuire first observed in 2004. Finally confident that her puppy, Cooper, had outgrown the chew-anything stage, Ms. McGuire, an experienced pilot from Westminster, Md., took him along for a ride in her Cessna. Shortly after takeoff, however, it became obvious that Cooper was having a dreadful time.

"He's a wild thing; he's usually bouncing off the walls," Ms. McGuire said. But the normally rambunctious dog started whimpering, then curled up in a ball at the plane's rear. Cooper's nemesis, she concluded, was engine noise, which can reach ear-splitting levels in the cockpit. If her beloved pet was ever going to enjoy aviation, he would need some way to block out the din.

Ms. McGuire tried stuffing foam earplugs into Cooper's ears, but he quickly resisted the intrusion. Then it dawned on her: if human pilots can wear bulky headsets, why can't dogs? She shared her idea with a friend in North Carolina, a fellow pilot who works as an engineer by day. The two soon began developing Mutt Muffs, an over-the-head hearing protector especially contoured for a dog's skull. ...

Ms. McGuire said she hoped to enlist the aid of an independent testing laboratory to calculate the Mutt Muffs' effectiveness. But such labs are unaccustomed to dealing with products made for animals; because of their lackluster language skills, dogs are unable to indicate when they can hear a sound, and when they can't. "I contacted about five laboratories, and they all scratched their heads and said, 'We'll get back to you,' " Ms. McGuire said. ...

So far, most customers have been pilots. But a few dog lovers who engage in other noisy pursuits have bought Mutt Muffs, too. Ms. McGuire said that one customer was a skeet shooter from Oregon; another, an Alaskan, liked to have his dog ride along in his snow-clearing machine.

Ms. McGuire has also fielded inquiries from less active pet owners. These potential customers, she said, don't want their dogs to enjoy aviation or the outdoors or even snow removal: they just want to prevent their pets from being frightened by thunder.

It's touching how devoted some people are to their dogs, and the lengths to which they'll go to make sure their dogs can share their lives.

Cultural Exchange
Mr. Vengeance

Ian Buruma in the Times magazine: Park Chanwook does not look like a violent man. When he isn't wearing glasses, his soft, round face resembles that of a gentle Tang dynasty Buddha. He speaks quietly and smiles a lot, more like a hip college professor than the director of an ultraviolent revenge trilogy. Pinned on the walls of his office in Seoul, among the movie posters and postcards, are photographs of his wife and 12-year-old daughter. His wife, whom he met at a university film club in the 1980's, reads all his scripts and is his most trusted adviser. Their daughter has seen most of his films. A nice, quiet, reflective family man, then, this 42-year-old director who also happens to be a master of imagery at times so brutal that it is almost unbearable to watch. ...

Earlier, in Park's office, I asked him if violence, even imaginary violence, was perhaps an exaggerated response to this virtual new world, an extreme form of human contact.

Park didn't answer my question immediately, but took his time, screwing up his eyes, working up a coherent answer, and then went off on a political riff on the nature of modern society. "Because of capitalism," he said, "relationships between people and their communities — family, or clan, or region — have largely broken down, especially in Asia." He had told me earlier that compared with filmmakers in the West, Koreans were "more sensitive about the tensions between individuals and society." The characters in his films, he said, were "bound to feel lonely and isolated from the world." That is why he often shows them communicating by e-mail or mobile phones, instead of actually seeing one another. "This puts a distance between people, leading to misunderstandings, which is interesting."

The same could be said of any modern society, but then Park told me a story that showed how much tradition can matter, even in cyberspace: "A young woman, working in our office, fell in love with a man through the Internet. The young man was so taken with her that he not only scrutinized her blog but followed all the links in her blog as well. He traced her family relationships, but also her entire private history, including her boyfriends going back to high-school days. Not only their names, but even their digital pictures came up through the links. In the end, he knew everything about her, without having to hire a detective."

Park continued: "You might find this invasion of privacy a bit scary, but young Koreans like it. It is, in a way, a revival of village life, a revival of community, where everyone knows everything about everyone else." But it is a peculiar community, where human intimacy takes place without physical contact. I returned to my question about violence. "Yes," Park said, "violence is a form of communication, whether good or bad — that isn't the issue. It is symbolic of a kind of human communication."

It's a fascinating profile of an interesting man; Park's one of those world citizens who's doing work that speaks to our civilization as a whole.

I really like his comparison of the Internet to a revival of village life--although it's a bit skewed to think of at first, it's true that privacy is a relatively modern concept, and actually in many parts of our world today it still doesn't exist.

Funny that there are billions of people in the Third World who see as an unbelievable luxury the same privacy that millions of people in the industrialized world think they'd like less of.

Our greatest luxury is the ability to choose delusion, without any real consequences.

The High Life
How Does Your Urban Garden Grow?

Three quarters of a century ago, the High Line was high tech.

The one-and-a-half-mile viaduct that runs from 34th Street to Gansevoort Street on the West Side of Manhattan transformed life on 10th Avenue by getting commercial trains out of the way of horses and pedestrians. But by the 1950's trucks were starting to transport more freight than trains, and in 1980 the High Line shut down for good.

Twenty years later, it had devolved into wildness, a flower-strewn stretch of prairie perched above the newly fashionable streets of the meatpacking district, West Chelsea and Clinton. It was just that wildness that made a certain segment of New York fall madly in love with it, particularly when they learned that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and various Chelsea landlords wanted it razed.

And so the group Friends of the High Line was born, with the aim of preserving that patch of green. "All of a sudden it's like 'Alice in Wonderland,' through the keyhole and you're in a magical place," one supporter explained in a documentary on the group's Web site. "There's New York City all around you and there you are — it's the wheat fields of Kansas, it's an alpine meadow, it's magic."

Edward Norton, the actor, put it this way: "The whole idea that something's been left alone long enough for nature to actually, like, take a foothold in it, and create this green space while no one was paying attention is fantastic to me. I love it."

The group won over artists, big-money donors, movie stars and eventually even politicians to its dreamily impractical goal.

Last Monday the Friends and their friends — including Diane von Furstenberg, Barry Diller, Kevin Bacon, Mr. Norton, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — gathered to break ground on a park that will one day span the High Line.

Such great quotes, such a great story. It's too bad we've gotten to the point where it's only through bureaucratic neglect that nature can survive; and if it wasn't for (powerful) people even that's not enough in the end.

Black Peril
Why Is Michael Steele a Republican Candidate?

Times Magazine: It was last spring when Karl Rove called Michael Steele, the lieutenant governor of Maryland, to sell him on running for the Senate, and to close the deal, Rove paused to put President Bush on the phone. As Steele recalls it, the president's adviser said, "Here, the boss wants to talk to you." Steele froze, then demurred. "I went, 'No, no thank you.' I was so stunned that he was going to hand the phone to the president. I said, 'That's all right, we'll have that call later.' I couldn't believe it." Other top Republicans called. Senator Elizabeth Dole. Ken Mehlman, the party chairman. One day Steele's cellphone rang, and Vice President Dick Cheney was on the other end.

Steele is the first African-American elected to statewide office in Maryland, which is usually one of the most reliably Democratic states in the nation. The counties bordering Washington are relentlessly liberal, as is its largest city, Baltimore. Steele lives in Prince George's County, which used to be tobacco plantations and is now the wealthiest majority-black county in the United States and normally a huge trove of Democratic votes. But to a Republican Party intent on securing its ascendancy by building a new base among America's minorities, Maryland looks like a land of opportunity. And a place where Democrats might be caught sleeping.

Open and personable, Steele had a prominent speaking role at the Republican convention in 2004, and by the following spring the Republican hierarchy was trying to coax him into the Senate race. The field was kept clear. Money was promised. It didn't matter that Steele lacked some of the attributes typical of a candidate running for high office. He was not a proven vote-getter, having ridden to victory as the running mate of Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a popular congressman from outside Baltimore who became the state's first Republican governor elected in 36 years. Steele, who is 47, had no personal fortune to offer up to the cause, no campaign war chest. He had been an associate in a law firm, then left that job to open a consulting firm that struggled.

What Steele had to offer, as a candidate, was personal biography, his inspiring life story: childhood in a poor section of Washington; college at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; then three years studying for the priesthood at a monastery, where he wore the long white tunic of the Augustinian order before deciding that his call to service lay elsewhere. His mother had worked in a laundry, making the minimum wage; his stepfather drove a limo. His parents weren't educated themselves, but they valued learning and made sure the homework in their household got done. Steele's only sibling is Monica Turner, a Georgetown-educated pediatrician (as well as an ex-wife of Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champ). ...

Joe Trippi, who is advising Kweisi Mfume, the former congressman and one of the Democrats vying to oppose Steele, paints a sort of developing nightmare for his party. "The Republicans are like the Chinese — they think in terms of like a 50-year plan," Trippi, who was an architect of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, told me. "Their goal is permanent realignment. What we have in Maryland is a national strategy against a party that is not strategizing at all."

I like Steel after reading the profile; as for comparing the GOP to Beijing, the Chinese would never have stumbled into a debate over immigration as ill-prepared and in as poor a strategic position as the Republicans are.

Laugh Despite It's True
David Letterman, as quoted by the Times:

There was a total eclipse of the sun today. President Bush said that the eclipse proves the unreliability of solar power.

Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas

William C. Taylor in the Times: LIKE many top executives, James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Marino keep a close eye on the stock market. But the two men, co-founders of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced — and highly classified — command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead, they focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company's engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

"We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I. "At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius." ...

Most companies operate under the assumption that big ideas come from a few big brains: the inspired founder, the eccentric inventor, the visionary boss. But there's a fine line between individual genius and know-it-all arrogance. What happens when rivals become so numerous, when technologies move so quickly, that no corporate honcho can think of everything? Then it's time to invent a less top-down approach to innovation, to make it everybody's business to come up with great ideas.

That's a key lesson behind the rise of open source technology, most notably Linux. A ragtag army of programmers organized into groups, wrote computer code, made the code available for anyone to revise and, by competing and cooperating in a global community, reshaped the market for software. The brilliance of Linux as a model of innovation is that it is powered by the grass-roots brilliance of the thousands of programmers who created it.

According to Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media, the computer book publisher, and an evangelist for open source technologies, creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling "architecture of participation." That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?

At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description — called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus — and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.

Sad that an article that essentially says companies need to make it easier for people at the top to hear good ideas treat the topic as such a find. Duh... this is why companies should have feedback buttons front and center on their website, and in one shape or form in everything customers see.

And why groupthink and office politics need to be fought. As President Bush has learned the hard way.

Odd, too, that the article is titled 'Let'--as if either the ideas won't happen otherwise, or they're not really ideas unless the people at the top are listening.

Given what you hear about the culture of the New York Times, the article should be must-reading internally.

Photo of when Yo-Yo Ma received a National Medal of the Arts in 2002 and requested that Condoleezza Rice accompany him by Larry Downing/Reuters.

Uncredited photo of Cooper from the Times.