Steven Davis

While Bitcoin was originally proposed as a currency, it has most of the attributes of a commodity bubble, including a huge halo of swindlers and scam artists working to exploit it. It's also horribly energy-inefficient and contributes to the current global semiconductor shortage, neither of which are desirable. Even worse: attempts at fixing Bitcoin mostly revolve around tweaking the "proof of work" required to add a transaction to the blockchain. Currently, BtC and relatives are computation-intensive. Other paradigms exist, including the new fad for Chiacoin, currently big in China, which is storage intensive — this is what happens when the designer of Bittorrent brings his own personal obsessions to bear on the problem of manufacturing scarcity, and if you want to upgrade your SSD or hard drive in the near future you'd better get right to it before this catches on.

(And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering. So fuck off and die if you own any, and especially if you thought pirating some of my work and turning it into NFTs would be a good way to milk the gullible.)

However, these aren't the only options.

It occurs to me that if you want a blockchain secured by scarcity and diminishing returns, you might consider other options that don't totally fuck our lived environment and that can't be gamed trivially by, say, running Chiacoin (the storage-space coin protocol) as part of the burn-in for new consumer grade drives your employer has you shoving in racks at Amazon S3 or maybe Arsebook. (Who totally have a first-mover advantage on that brain-damaged currency in the "phone my customer account manager at Western Digital, tell him I want another ten million terabytes of non-shingled platters" stakes.)

For example, to Elon Musk, a modest proposal:

Hork up a bunch of space probes going somewhere of interest to JPL or NASA or ESA, as both a tax write-off and an apology to the international astronomical community whose night skies you just vandalized with Starlink. Order, say, a dozen. For energy where they're going and for what's coming next they're definitely going to need RTGs, but you're not as fussy about maximum launch weight as the US government (you have Falcon Heavy and, soon, Starship to launch them with) so you can order up something running on, say, Strontium-90: it'll be heavier, but who cares. You're also going to use some of the power from it to run ion rockets for positioning and slow long-term acceleration (hint: Starlink uses ion propulsion for station keeping/reboost: presumably SpaceX have got quite a bit of experience with this tech by now).

So, you kindly donated a couple of dozen probes to Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and the rest of the gang (and the dwarf planet wonks are ecstatic).

But you're not going to be using much bandwidth for sending back data, most of the time. So what to do with those radio transmitters you just kicked out at something above solar escape velocity?

Code signing, that's what you do.

Each probe has a dedicated crypto processor and a very VERY private key. It receives a constant uplink from the ground, and replies by signing and echoing back to Earth the blockchain transactions it receives. The further away from Earth it gets, the longer the delay. Also, the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes. You might be able to make an end run around the queue by bribing someone, but gambits based on building hardware are going to run into the wee problem that Deep Space Tracking Networks aren't off-the-shelf commodities and even if they were, you couldn't force the receding space probe to listen to your transmitter and reply (presumably the uplink is secured by the coin owner's own PKI system).

Upshot: it's a cryptocoin system with a big up-front setup cost (as in, billions), which is good (it deters low-end me-too systems), guaranteed scarcity of signing resources, and absolutely no advantage accruing to anyone buying up earthly power or material resources. So it shouldn't drive scarcity in hard disks/GPUs or unreasonable power demands. Flip side: there's a centralized chokepoint (the deep space network) that can be throttled by governments. But some might see this as an advantage ...

PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route. Let's hope other governments follow suit rapidly and we can say goodbye to this Trump-grade lunatical grift before it degrades our lived environment any more.

PPS: I despise libertarianism. Just in case you were wondering ...

(This is the text of a keynote talk I just delivered at the IT Futures conference held by the University of Edinburgh Informatics centre today. NB: Some typos exist; I'll fix them tonight.)

Good morning. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I write fiction—deliberate non-truths designed to inform, amuse, and examine the human condition. More specifically, I'm a science fiction writer, mostly focusing on the intersection between the human condition and our technological and scientific environment: less Star Wars, more about bank heists inside massively multiplayer computer games, or the happy fun prospects for 3D printer malware.

One of the besetting problems of near-future science fiction is that life comes at you really fast these days. Back when I agreed to give this talk, I had no idea we'd be facing a general election campaign — much less that the outcome would already be known, with consequences that pretty comprehensively upset any predictions I was making back in September.

So, because I'm chicken, I'm going to ignore current events and instead take this opportunity to remind you that I can't predict the future. No science fiction writer can. Predicting the future isn't what science fiction is about. As the late Edsger Djikstra observed, "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." He might well have added, or science fiction is about predicting the future. What I try to do is examine the human implications of possible developments, and imagine what consequences they might have. (Hopefully entertainingly enough to convince the general public to buy my books.)

So: first, let me tell you some of my baseline assumptions so that you can point and mock when you re-read the transcript of this talk in a decade's time.

Ten years in the future, we will be living in a world recognizable as having emerged from the current one by a process of continuous change. About 85% of everyone alive in 2029 is already alive in 2019. (Similarly, most of the people who're alive now will still be alive a decade hence, barring disasters on a historic scale.)

Here in the UK the average home is 75 years old, so we can reasonably expect most of the urban landscape of 2029 to be familiar. I moved to Edinburgh in 1995: while the Informatics Forum is new, as a side-effect of the disastrous 2002 old town fire, many of the university premises are historic. Similarly, half the cars on the road today will still be on the roads in 2029, although I expect most of the diesel fleet will have been retired due to exhaust emissions, and there will be far more electric vehicles around.

You don't need a science fiction writer to tell you this stuff: 90% of the world of tomorrow plus ten years is obvious to anyone with a weekly subscription to New Scientist and more imagination than a doorknob.

What's less obvious is the 10% of the future that isn't here yet. Of that 10%, you used to be able to guess most of it — 9% of the total — by reading technology road maps in specialist industry publications. We know what airliners Boeing and Airbus are starting development work on, we can plot the long-term price curve for photovoltaic panels, read the road maps Intel and ARM provide for hardware vendors, and so on. It was fairly obvious in 2009 that Microsoft would still be pushing some version of Windows as a platform for their hugely lucrative business apps, and that Apple would have some version of NeXTStep — excuse me, macOS — as a key element of their vertically integrated hardware business. You could run the same guessing game for medicines by looking at clinical trials reports, and seeing which drugs were entering second-stage trials — an essential but hugely expensive prerequisite for a product license, which requires a manufacturer to be committed to getting the drug on the market by any means possible (unless there's a last-minute show-stopper), 5-10 years down the line.

Obsolescence is also largely predictable. The long-drawn-out death of the pocket camera was clearly visible on the horizon back in 2009, as cameras in smartphones were becoming ubiquitous: ditto the death of the pocket GPS system, the compass, the camcorder, the PDA, the mp3 player, the ebook reader, the pocket games console, and the pager. Smartphones are technological cannibals, swallowing up every available portable electronic device that can be crammed inside its form factor.

However, this stuff ignores what Donald Rumsfeld named "the unknown unknowns". About 1% of the world of ten years hence always seems to have sprung fully-formed from the who-ordered-THAT dimension: we always get landed with stuff nobody foresaw or could possibly have anticipated, unless they were spectacularly lucky guessers or had access to amazing hallucinogens. And this 1% fraction of unknown unknowns regularly derails near-future predictions.

In the 1950s and 1960s, futurologists were obsessed with resource depletion, the population bubble, and famine: Paul Ehrlich and the other heirs of Thomas Malthus predicted wide-scale starvation by the mid-1970s as the human population bloated past the unthinkable four billion mark. They were wrong, as it turned out, because of the unnoticed work of a quiet agronomist, Norman Borlaug, who was pioneering new high yield crop strains: what became known as the Green Revolution more than doubled global agricultural yields within the span of a couple of decades. Meanwhile, it turned out that the most effective throttle on population growth was female education and emancipation: the rate of growth has slowed drastically and even reversed in some countries, and WHO estimates of peak population have been falling continuously as long as I can remember. So the take-away I'd like you to keep is that the 1% of unknown unknowns are often the most significant influences on long-term change.

If I was going to take a stab at identifying a potential 1% factor, the unknown unknowns that dominate for the second and third decade of the 21st century, I wouldn't point to climate change — the dismal figures are already quite clear — but to the rise of algorithmically targeted advertising campaigns combined with the ascendancy of social networking. Our news media, driven by the drive to maximize advertising click-throughs for revenue, have been locked in a race to the bottom for years now. In the past half-decade this has been weaponized, in conjunction with data mining of the piles of personal information social networks try to get us to disclose (in the pursuit of advertising bucks), to deliver toxic propaganda straight into the eyeballs of the most vulnerable — with consequences that are threaten to undermine the legitimacy of democratic governmance on a global scale.

Today's internet ads are qualitatively different from the direct mail campaigns of yore. In the age of paper, direct mail came with a steep price of entry, which effectively limited it in scope — also, the print distribution chain was it relatively easy to police. The efflorescence of spam from 1992 onwards should have warned us that junk information drives out good, but the spam kings of the 1990s were just the harbinger of today's information apocalypse. The cost of pumping out misinformation is frighteningly close to zero, and bad information drives out good: if the propaganda is outrageous and exciting it goes viral and spreads itself for free.

The recommendation algorithms used by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter exploit this effect to maximize audience participation in pursuit of maximize advertising click-throughs. They promote popular related content, thereby prioritizing controversial and superficially plausible narratives. Viewer engagement is used to iteratively fine-tune the selection of content so that it is more appealing, but it tends to trap us in filter bubbles of material that reinforces our own existing beliefs. And bad actors have learned to game these systems to promote dubious content. It's not just Cambridge Analytica I'm talking about here, or allegations of Russian state meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Consider the spread of anti-vaccination talking points and wild conspiracy theories, which are no longer fringe phenomena but mass movements with enough media traction to generate public health emergencies in Samoa and drive-by shootings in Washington DC. Or the spread of algorithmically generated knock-offs of children's TV shows proliferating on YouTube that caught the public eye last year.

... And then there's the cute cat photo thing. If I could take a time machine back to 1989 and tell an audience like yourselves that in 30 years time we'd all have pocket supercomputers that place all of human knowledge at our fingertips, but we'd mostly use them for looking at kitten videos and nattering about why vaccination is bad for your health, you'd have me sectioned under the Mental Health Act. And you'd be acting reasonably by the standards of the day: because unlike fiction, emergent human culture is under no obligation to make sense.

Let's get back to the 90/9/1 percent distribution, that applies to the components of the near future: 90% here today, 9% not here yet but on the drawing boards, and 1% unpredictable. I came up with that rule of thumb around 2005, but the ratio seems to be shifting these days. Changes happen faster, and there are more disruptive unknown-unknowns hitting us from all quarters with every passing decade. This is a long-established trend: throughout most of recorded history, the average person lived their life pretty much the same way as their parents and grandparents. Long-term economic growth averaged less than 0.1% per year over the past two thousand years. It has only been since the onset of the industrial revolution that change has become a dominant influence on human society. I suspect the 90/9/1 distribution is now something more like 85/10/5 — that is, 85% of the world of 2029 is here today, about 10% can be anticipated, and the random, unwelcome surprises constitute up to 5% of the mix. Which is kind of alarming, when you pause to think about it.

In the natural world, we're experiencing extreme weather events caused by anthropogenic climate change at an increasing frequency. Back in 1989, or 2009, climate change was a predictable thing that mostly lay in the future: today in 2019, or tomorrow in 2029, random-seeming extreme events (the short-term consequences of long-term climactic change) are becoming commonplace. Once-a-millennium weather outrages are already happening once a decade: by 2029 it's going to be much, much worse, and we can expect the onset of destabilization of global agriculture, resulting in seemingly random food shortages as one region or another succumbs to drought, famine, or wildfire.

In the human cultural sphere, the internet is pushing fifty years old, and not only have we become used to it as a communications medium, we've learned how to second-guess and game it. 2.5 billion people are on Facebook, and the internet reaches almost half the global population. I'm a man of certain political convictions, and I'm trying very hard to remain impartial here, but we have just come through a spectacularly dirty election campaign in which home-grown disinformation (never mind propaganda by external state-level actors) has made it almost impossible to get trustworthy information about topics relating to party policies. One party renamed its Twitter-verified feed from its own name to FactCheckUK for the duration of a televised debate. Again, we've seen search engine optimization techniques deployed successfully by a party leader — let's call him Alexander de Pfeffel something-or-other — who talked at length during a TV interview about his pastime of making cardboard model coaches. This led Google and other search engines to downrank a certain referendum bus with a promise about saving £350M a week for the NHS painted on its side, a promise which by this time had become deeply embarrassing.

This sort of tactic is viable in the short term, but in the long term is incredibly corrosive to public trust in the media — in all media.

Nor are the upheavals confined to the internet.

Over the past two decades we've seen revolutions in stock market and forex trading. At first it was just competition for rackspace as close as possible to the stock exchange switches, to minimize packet latency — we're seeing the same thing playing out on a smaller scale among committed gamers, picking and choosing ISPs for the lowest latency — then the high frequency trading arms race, in which case fuzzing the market by injecting "noise" in the shape of tiny but frequent trades allowed volume traders to pick up an edge (and effectively made small-scale day traders obsolete). I lack inside information but I'm pretty sure if you did a deep dive into what's going on behind the trading desks at FTSE and NASDAQ today you'd find a lot of powerful GPU clusters running Generative Adversarial Networks to manage trades in billions of pounds' worth of assets. Lights out, nobody home, just the products of the post-2012 boom in deep learning hard at work, earning money on behalf of the old, slow, procedural AIs we call corporations.

What do I mean by that — calling corporations AIs?

Although speculation about mechanical minds goes back a lot further, the field of Artificial Intelligence was largely popularized and publicized by the groundbreaking 1956 Dartmouth Conference organized by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester of IBM. The proposal for the conference asserted that, "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it", a proposition that I think many of us here would agree with, or at least be willing to debate. (Alan Turing sends his apologies.) Furthermore, I believe mechanisms exhibiting many of the features of human intelligence had already existed for some centuries by 1956, in the shape of corporations and other bureaucracies. A bureaucracy is a framework for automating decision processes that a human being might otherwise carry out, using human bodies (and brains) as components: a corporation adds a goal-seeking constraints and real-world i/o to the procedural rules-based element.

As justification for this outrageous assertion — that corporations are AIs — I'd like to steal philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment and misapply it creatively. Searle, a skeptic about the post-Dartmouth Hard AI project — the proposition that symbolic computation could be used to build a mind — suggested the thought experiment as a way to discredit the idea that a digital computer executing a program can be said to have a mind. But I think he inadvertently demonstrated something quite different.

To crib shamelessly from wikipedia:

Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer comfortably passes the Turing test, by convincing a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.

The question Searle asks is: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese?

Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.

Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted by the user as demonstrating intelligent conversation. But Searle himself would not be able to understand the conversation.

The problem with this argument is that it is apparent that a company is nothing but a very big Chinese Room, containing a large number of John Searles, all working away at their rule sets and inputs. We many not agree that an AI "understands" Chinese, but we can agree that it performs symbolic manipulation; and a room full of bureaucrats looks awfully similar to a hypothetical Turing-test-passing procedural AI from here.

Companies don't literally try to pass the Turing test, but they exchange information with other companies — and they are powerful enough to process inputs far beyond the capacity of an individual human brain. A Boeing 787 airliner contains on the order of six million parts and is produced by a consortium of suppliers (coordinated by Boeing); designing it is several orders of magnitude beyond the competence of any individual engineer, but the Boeing "Chinese Room" nevertheless developed a process for designing, testing, manufacturing, and maintaining such a machine, and it's a process that is not reliant on any sole human being.

Where, then, is Boeing's mind?

I don't think Boeing has a mind as such, but it functions as an ad-hoc rules-based AI system, and exhibits drives that mirror those of an actual life form. Corporations grow, predate on one another, seek out sources of nutrition (revenue streams), and invade new environmental niches. Corporations exhibit metabolism, in the broadest sense of the word — they take in inputs and modify them, then produce outputs, including a surplus of money that pays for more inputs. Like all life forms they exist to copy information into the future. They treat human beings as interchangeable components, like cells in a body: they function as superorganisms — hive entities — and they reap efficiency benefits when they replace fallible and fragile human components with automated replacements.

Until relatively recently the automation of corporate functions was limited to mid-level bookkeeping operations — replacing ledgers with spreadsheets and databases — but we're now seeing the spread of robotic systems outside manufacturing to areas such as lights-out warehousing, and the first deployments of deep learning systems for decision support.

I spoke about this at length a couple of years ago in a talk I delivered at the Chaos Communications Congress in Leipzig, titled "Dude, You Broke the Future" — you can find it on YouTube and a text transcript on my blog — so I'm not going to dive back into that topic today. Instead I'm going to talk about some implications of the post-2012 AI boom that weren't obvious to me two years ago.

Corporations aren't the only pre-electronic artificial intelligences we've developed. Any bureaucracy is a rules-based information processing system. Governments are superorganisms that behave like very large corporations, but differ insofar as they can raise taxes (thereby creating demand for circulating money, which they issue), stimulating economic activity. They can recirculate their revenue through constructive channels such as infrastructure maintenance, or destructive ones such as military adventurism. Like corporations, governments are potentially immortal until an external threat or internal decay damages them beyond repair. By promulgating and enforcing laws, governments provide an external environment within which the much smaller rules-based corporations can exist.

(I should note that at this level, it doesn't matter whether the government's claim to legitimacy is based on the will of the people, the divine right of kings, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster: I'm talking about the mechanical working of a civil service bureaucracy, what it does rather than why it does it.)

And of course this brings me to a third species of organism: academic institutions like the University of Edinburgh.

Viewed as a corporation, the University of Edinburgh is impressively large. With roughly 4000 academic staff, 5000 administrative staff, and 36,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students (who may be considered as a weird chimera of customers and freelance contractors), it has a budget of close to a billion pounds a year. Like other human superorganisms, Edinburgh University exists to copy itself into the future — the climactic product of a university education is, of course, a professor (or alternatively a senior administrator), and if you assemble a critical mass of lecturers and administrators in one place and give them a budget and incentives to seek out research funding and students, you end up with an academic institution.

Quantity, as the military say, has a quality all of its own. Just as the Boeing Corporation can undertake engineering tasks that dwarf anything a solitary human can expect to achieve within their lifetime, so too can an institution out-strip the educational or research capabilities of a lone academic. That's why we have universities: they exist to provide a basis for collaboration, quality control, and information exchange. In an idealized model university, peers review one another's research results and allocate resources to future investigations, meanwhile training undergraduate students and guiding postgraduates, some of whom will become the next generation of researchers and teachers. (In reality, like a swan gliding serenely across the surface of a pond, there's a lot of thrashing around going on beneath the surface.)

The corpus of knowledge that a student needs to assimilate to reach the coal face of their chosen field exceeds the competence of any single educator, so we have division of labour and specialization among the teachers: and the same goes for the practice of research (and, dare I say it, writing proposals and grant applications).

Is the University of Edinburgh itself an artificial intelligence, then?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say " not yet". While the University Court is a body corporate established by statute, and the administration of any billion pound organization of necessity shares traits with the other rules-based bureaucracies, we can't reasonably ascribe a theory of mind, or actual self-aware consciousness, to a university. Indeed, we can't ascribe consciousness to any of the organizations and processes around us that we call AI.

Artificial Intelligence really has come to mean three different things these days, although they all fall under the heading of "decision making systems opaque to human introspection". We have the classical bureaucracy, with its division of labour and procedures executed by flawed, fallible human components. Next, we have the rules-based automation of the 1950s through 1990s, from Expert Systems to Business Process Automation systems — tools which improve the efficiency and reliability of the previous bureaucratic model and enable it to operate with fewer human cogs in the gearbox. And since roughly 2012 we've had a huge boom in neural computing, which I guess is what brings us here today.

Neural networks aren't new: they started out as an attempt in the early 1950s to model the early understanding of how animal neurons work. The high level view of nerves back then — before we learned a lot of confusing stuff about pre- and post-synaptic receptor sites, receptor subtypes, microtubules, and so on — is that they're wiring and switches, with some basic additive and subtractive logic superimposed. (I'm going to try not to get sidetracked into biology here.) Early attempts at building recognizers using neural network circuitry, such as 1957's Perceptron network, showed initial promise. But they were sidelined after 1969 when Minsky and Papert formally proved that a perceptron was computationally weak — it couldn't be used to compute an Exclusive-OR function. As a result of this resounding vote of no-confidence, research into neural networks stagnated until the 1980s and the development of backpropagation. And even with a more promising basis for work, the field developed slowly thereafter, hampered by the then-available computers.

A few years ago I compared the specifications for my phone — an iPhone 5, at that time — with a Cray X-MP supercomputer. By virtually every metric, the iPhone kicked sand in the face of its 30-year supercomputing predecessor, and today I could make the same comparison with my wireless headphones or my wrist watch. We tend to forget how inexorable the progress of Moore's Law has been over the past five decades. It has brought us roughly ten orders of magnitude of performance improvements in storage media and working memory, a mere nine or so orders of magnitude in processing speed, and a dismal seven orders of magnitude in networking speed.

In search of a concrete example, I looked up the performance figures for the GPU card in the newly-announced Mac Pro; it's a monster capable of up to 28.3 Teraflops, with 1Tb/sec memory bandwidth and up to 64Gb of memory. This is roughly equivalent to the NEC Earth Simulator of 2002, a supercomputer cluster which filled 320 cabinets, consumed 6.4 MW of power, and cost the Japanese government 60 billion Yen (or about £250M) to build. The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPU I'm talking about is obviously much more specialized and doesn't come with the 700Tb disks or 1.6 petabytes of tape backup, but for raw numerical throughput — which is a key requirement in training a neural network — it's competitive. Which is to say: a 2020 workstation is roughly as powerful as half a billion pounds-worth of 2002 supercomputer when it comes to training deep learning applications.

In fact, the iPad I'm reading this talk from — a 2018 iPad Pro — has a processor chipset that includes a dedicated 8-core neural engine capable of processing 5 trillion 8-bit operations per second. So, roughly comparable to a mid-90s supercomputer.

Life (and Moore's Law) comes at you fast, doesn't it?

But the news on the software front is less positive. Today, our largest neural networks aspire to the number of neurons found in a mouse brain, but they're structurally far simpler. The largest we've actually trained to do something useful are closer in complexity to insects. And you don't have to look far to discover the dismal truth: we may be able to train adversarial networks to recognize human faces most of the time, but there are also famous failures.

For example, there's the Home Office passport facial recognition system deployed at airports. It was recently reported that it has difficulty recognizing faces with very pale or very dark skin tones, and sometimes mistakes larger than average lips for an open mouth. If the training data set is rubbish, the output is rubbish, and evidently the Home Office used a training set that was not sufficiently diverse. The old IT proverb applies, "garbage in, garbage out" — now with added opacity.

The key weakness of neural network applications is that they're only as good as the data set they're trained against. The training data is invariably curated by humans. And so, the deep learning application tends to replicate the human trainers' prejudices and misconceptions.

Let me give you some more cautionary tales. Amazon is a huge corporation, with roughly 750,000 employees. That's a huge human resources workload, so they sank time and resources into training a network to evaluate resumes from job applicants, in order to pre-screen them and spit out the top 5% for actual human interaction. Unfortunately the training data set consisted of resumes from existing engineering employees, and even more unfortunately a very common underlying quality of an Amazon engineering employee is that they tend to be white and male. Upshot: the neural network homed in on this and the project was ultimately cancelled because it suffered from baked-in prejudice.

Google Translate provides is another example. Turkish has a gender-neutral pronoun for the third-person singular that has no English-language equivalent. (The closest would be the third-person plural pronoun, "they".) Google Translate was trained on a large corpus of documents, but came down with a bad case of gender bias in 2017, when it was found to be turning the neutral pronoun into a "he" when in the same sentence as "doctor" or "hard working," and a "she" when it was in proximity to "lazy" and "nurse."

Possibly my favourite (although I drew a blank in looking for the source, so you should treat this as possibly apocryphal) was a DARPA-funded project to distinguish NATO main battle tanks from foreign tanks. It got excellent results using training data, but wasn't so good in the field ... because it turned out that the recognizer had gotten very good at telling the difference between snow and forest scenes and arms trade shows. (Russian tanks are frequently photographed in winter conditions — who could possibly have imagined that?)

Which brings me back to Edinburgh University.

I can speculate wildly about the short-term potential for deep learning in the research and administration areas. Research: it's a no-brainer to train a GAN to do the boring legwork of looking for needles in the haystacks of experimental data, whether it be generated by genome sequencers or radio telescopes. Technical support: just this last weekend I was talking to a bloke whose startup is aiming to use deep learning techniques to monitor server logs and draw sysadmin attention to anomalous patterns in them. Administration: if we can just get past the "white, male" training trap that tripped up Amazon, they could have a future in screening job candidates or student applications. Ditto, automating helpdesk tasks — the 80/20 rule applies, and chatbots backed by deep learing could be a very productive tool in sorting out common problems before they require human intervention. This stuff is obvious.

But it's glaringly clear that we need to get better — much better — at critiquing the criteria by which training data is compiled, and at working out how to sanity-test deep learning applications.

For example, consider a GAN trained to evaluate research grant proposals. It's almost inevitable that some smart-alec will think of this (and then attempt to use feedback from GANs to improve grant proposals, by converging on the set of characteristics that have proven most effective in extracting money from funding organizations in the past). But I'm almost certain that any such system would tend to recommend against ground-breaking research by default: promoting proposals that resemble past work research is no way to break new ground.

Medical clinical trials focus disproportionately on male subjects, to such an extent that some medicines receive product licenses without being tested on women of childbearing age at all. If we use existing trials as training data for identifying possible future treatments we'll inevitably end up replicating historic biases, missing significant opportunities to improve breakthrough healthcare to demographics who have been overlooked.

Or imagine the uses of GANs for screening examinations — either to home in on patterns indicative of understanding in essay questions (grading essays being a huge and tedious chore), or (more controversially) to identify cheating and plagiarism. The opacity of GANs means that it's possible that they will encode some unsuspected prejudices on the part of the examiners whose work they are being trained to reproduce. More troublingly, GANs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: if the training set for a neural network is available, it's possible to identify inputs which will exploit features of the network to produce incorrect outputs. If a neural network is used to gatekeep some resource of interest to human beings, human beings will try to pick the lock, and the next generation of plagiarists will invest in software to produce false negatives when their essay mill purchases are screened.

And let's not even think about the possible applications of neurocomputing to ethics committees, not to mention other high-level tasks that soak up valuable faculty time. Sooner or later someone will try to use GANs to pre-screen proposed applications of GANs for problems of bias. Which might sound like a worthy project, but if the bias is already encoded in the ethics monitoring neural network, experiments will be allowed to go forward that really shouldn't, and vice versa.

Professor Noel Sharkey of Sheffield University went public yesterday with a plea for decision algorithms that impact peoples' lives — from making decisions on bail applications in the court system, to prefiltering job applications — to be subjected to large-scale trials before roll-out, to the same extent as pharmaceuticals (which have a similar potential to blight lives if they aren't carefully tested). He suggests that the goal should be to demonstrate that there is no statistically significant in-built bias before algorithms are deployed in roles that detrimentally affect human subjects: he's particularly concerned by military proposals to field killer drones without a human being in the decision control loop. I can't say that he's wrong, because he's very, very right.

"Computer says no" was a funny catch-phrase in "Little Britain" because it was really an excuse a human jobsworth used to deny a customer's request. It's a whole lot less funny when it really is the computer saying "no", and there's no human being in the loop. But what if the computer is saying "no" because its training data doesn't like left-handedness or Tuesday mornings? Would you even know? And where do you go if there's no right of appeal to a human being?

So where is AI going?

Now, I've just been flailing around wildly in the dark for half an hour. I'm probably laughably wrong about some of this stuff, especially in the detail level. But I'm willing to stick my neck out and make some firm predictions.

Firstly, for a decade now IT departments have been grappling with the bring-your-own-device age. We're now moving into the bring-your-own-neural-processor age, and while I don't know what the precise implications are, I can see it coming. As I mentioned, there's a neural processor in my iPad. In ten years time, future-iPad will probably have a neural processor three orders of magnitude more powerful (at least) than my current one, getting up into the trillion ops per second range. And all your students and staff will be carrying this sort of machine around on their person, all day. In their phones, in their wrist watches, in their augmented reality glasses.

The Chinese government's roll-out of social scoring on a national level may seem like a dystopian nightmare, but something not dissimilar could be proposed by a future university administration as a tool for evaluating students by continuous assessment, the better to provide feedback to them. As part of such a program we could reasonably expect to see ubiquitous deployment of recognizers, quite possibly as a standard component of educational courseware. Consider a distance learning application which uses gaze tracking, by way of a front-facing camera, to determine what precisely the students are watching. It could be used to provide provide feedback to the lecturer, or to direct the attention of viewers to something they've missed, or to pay for the courseware by keeping eyeballs on adverts. Any of these purposes are possible, if not desirable.

With a decade's time for maturation I'd expect to see the beginnings of a culture of adversarial malware designed to fool the watchers. It might be superficially harmless at first, like tools for fooling the gaze tracker in the aforementioned app into thinking a hung-over student is not in fact asleep in front of their classroom screen. But there are darker possibilities, and they only start with cheating continuous assessments or faking research data. If a future Home Office tries to automate the PREVENT program for detecting and combating radicalization, or if they try to extend it — for example, to identify students holding opinions unsympathetic to the governing party of the day — we could foresee pushback from staff and students, and some of the pushback could be algorithmic.

This is proximate-future stuff, mind you. In the long term, all bets are off. I am not a believer in the AI singularity — the rapture of the nerds — that is, in the possibility of building a brain-in-a-box that will self-improve its own capabilities until it outstrips our ability to keep up. What CS professor and fellow SF author Vernor Vinge described as "the last invention humans will ever need to make". But I do think we're going to keep building more and more complicated, systems that are opaque rather than transparent, and that launder our unspoken prejudices and encode them in our social environment. As our widely-deployed neural processors get more powerful, the decisions they take will become harder and harder to question or oppose. And that's the real threat of AI — not killer robots, but "computer says no" without recourse to appeal.

I'm running on fumes at this point, but if I have any message to leave you with, it's this: AI and neurocomputing isn't magical and it's not the solution to all our problems, but it is dangerously non-transparent. When you're designing systems that rely on AI, please bear in mind that neural networks can fixate on the damndest stuff rather than what you want them to measure. Leave room for a human appeals process, and consider the possibility that your training data may be subtly biased or corrupt, or that it might be susceptible to adversarial attack, or that it turns yesterday's prejudices into an immutable obstacle that takes no account of today's changing conditions.

And please remember that the point of a university is to copy information into the future through the process of educating human brains. And the human brain is still the most complex neural network we've created to date.

South Korean tattoo artist Woojin Choi, or Oozy, creates detailed black and white works which often incorporate a macabre twist. His fine line tattoos explore scenes that are not as innocent as they first appear, such as a geisha who partially hides her own skeleton behind a decorative fan, and a figure who is being lifted from (or dropped into) a bowl of Chashu ramen.

Oozy’s pieces are often very line-oriented, an effect that resonates with the appearance of classic woodblock prints. The tattoo artist also associates this aesthetic with his background in animation, a subject he is currently majoring in at school. You can see more of the South Korea-based artist’s work on his Instagram.

So, I remember when I tried to sell someone one of my older, high quality domain names. At the start of the negotiation process, we were at a standoff…

Should I make the first offer? Or should he?

We traded several emails. None of us crossed the line. He wouldn’t tell me what he wanted to pay and I wouldn’t tell him my price.

Me: “So, what range are you looking at?”

Him: “I’m not even sure where to begin here. I wouldn’t want to offer something that would be insulting.”

Me: “I appreciate that. This is a great domain name. I’ve had a few offers in the past, and I held on to it. I’m not even sure if I want to let it go…”

Him: “I like the domain too. I’m looking at a few domains actually, and this is just one of them. But I’m happy we’re talking. Because I do want to resolve this soon…”

This negotiation standoff is all too common.

And it’s dumb.

Here’s why…

The #1 Reason Why You Should RUSH to Make The First Offer In A Negotiation

There’s a common misconception in sales where people believe, “The first person to make an offer loses.”

This advice used to be true.

Before the internet, the customer didn’t have the power over the salesperson. They didn’t have information. They didn’t have an easy way to find past clients who also worked with this same person or company.

But now? They’re just one Google search away. I even filmed a video about how to negotiate.

And that’s why I believe you should almost always rush to make the first offer… whether you’re buying or selling.

Here’s why…

It’s all about the cognitive bias known as “anchoring.” Let me explain with an example about soup. Soup? Yes…

A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, tested the effect of limiting the number of cans of soup customers could buy. You might have seen similar offers at the grocery store…

Is it because the store really doesn’t want you to buy more? Seems unlikely…

(Although, yes, grocery stores will do this with a “loss leader” to get you through the door, too. But that’s a different topic.)

Well, in this study, there was a “Limit of 12 per person” for cans of soup.

What happened?

Without the limit, people bought an average of 3.3 cans. But once the limit of 12 cans per person was introduced…

People bought an average of 7 cans!

People see the number 12 and it becomes their “anchor.” So now, when they decide how many cans to buy, they adjust based on that number.

This is anchoring in full effect. It means that we as humans, tend to rely too much on the first piece of information we get. Like the number 12, in the soup example.

This anchoring effect is the reason why it’s often a good idea to make the first offer in a negotiation.

By setting a favorable anchor, you can sway the outcome of the negotiation. That’s why making the first offer is often the best strategy.

However…

Adam D. Galinsky, who studies how particular strategies affect outcomes in negotiations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, points out that there are a few things to keep in mind:

For one, when you do lead in a negotiation, it’s important you make an AGGRESSIVE first offer.

Otherwise, there’s no point. If your first offer is the same as your “reservation price” – meaning, the minimum you’d be willing to accept – you’ll end up with either a bad deal or no deal at all.

That’s why Galinsky suggests you set your anchor based on your TARGET price. That is, an outcome that you’d be 100% happy with.

So, when you set an anchor, don’t set it at the minimum you’re willing to accept. Set it at a level where you’d be THRILLED to make a deal.

That’s how you’ll end up with a better deal. Plus, it allows you to make concessions… Which is crucial to make any deal happen. And it will make the other party feel better about reaching an agreement, too.

Now, while you should be aggressive, you shouldn’t be ABSURDLY aggressive. If your counterpart thinks there’s NO chance of reaching an agreement, they’ll just walk away. So, if you have very little information about your counterpart’s reservation price, making the first offer can be tricky.

Also, if you you know NOTHING about the product or service at stake, you run the risk of making a first offer that’s too LOW. That would be… well, kind of dumb.

So, if you use this “first offer” strategy, make sure you’re at least in the right ballpark.

With that said, I recently noticed something strange:

People tend to make their first offer a round number.

For example, let’s say you want to sell your service. You meet with a potential new client. You’re smart and use the first offer strategy. So, you go ahead and give them a price quote. To keep it simple, you might say, “I’ll do everything you want me to do for $1,000.”

I know why people do this… You want to keep it simple. It’s easy for you. It’s easy for them.

But new research from Columbia University shows that it’s actually a mistake.

Especially if you want to take full advantage of the anchoring effect. Which is the whole point of making the first offer.

I’ll explain…

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that when you make a PRECISE first offer, you get a LESS AGGRESSIVE counter offer. Leading to a more favorable final outcome for you.

Meaning…

The anchor you set with a PRECISE number is MORE effective than when you use a round number.

(I filmed a video about 3 ways to instantly boost credibility. You may want to watch this too).

So in the example above, it would be better to quote your price precisely: Instead of $1,000, make your first offer $1,150.

It’s a pretty simple tweak, right?

Well, the study also found a possible explanation for this effect:

When you make a precise offer, it shows that you’re not just pulling a number out of thin air! A precise number looks more informed. It implies you actually know what you’re talking about.

This makes sense intuitively…

A “precise” first offer looks more like the real indicator of value. The result? You’re less likely to face an aggressive counter-offer!

So, next time you make a “first offer” don’t use a round number to “keep it simple.” It might seem like you came up with a number out of thin air… and people are going to try to haggle.

Instead, make an aggressive and PRECISE first offer. That’s how you’ll take FULL advantage of the anchoring effect in negotiations.

Now back to the domain name…

I ended up not selling it.

What I ended up discovering was something as simple as this:

The guy knew I owned the domain name and he wanted to rip me off.

I walked away.

Now here’s what I’d like to know…

Have you ever been in a negotiation where you made the first offer and successfully anchored a high value? Or has it ever backfired?

I want to hear your negotiation story!

One of the frequent challenges for finishers is the undulating surfaced — carvings, moldings, and similar.  In reviewing the historic methods for the CW crew I emphasized the problems of square-tipped brushes for this process, as the corner tips of the brushes often squeegee on the raised surfaces being varnished, resulting in excess varnish and runs dripping down the surface.  This result often causes hair pulling and pungent language.

In the past the ancients often used oval or even round brushes similar to sash brushes, and thus reduced the problem.  In our time, we not only have these brushes to rely on but also a form used by water colorists, the Filbert Mop.  The tapers oval tip of a Filbert makes varnishing a vibrant undulating surface a piece of cake.  Not only are there no brush corners to deposit excess varnish where you do not want it, but the tapered oval tip drapes the surface excellently.

The preparation for carved surfaces is essentially the same as flat surfaces; good tool work followed by scraping as necessary, and finally burnished with a bundle of fibers.

After that it’s simply a matter of applying the varnish by brush, and not too surprisingly this crew tool to this like a fish to water.

After the initial application dries, the surface can once again be burnished with the carver’s polissoir, a tool I designed for my broom-maker to fabricate along with all the other polissoirs he makes for me.  This was followed by  second round of varnishing, and the pieces were ready to be rubbed out with beeswax and rottenstone (grey Tripoli).

While I was occupied with the Roubo bench slab in the center hall of the barn John was a dozen feet away in the classroom tinkering with the Winterthur ripple molding cutter.  When we gathered earlier as a group we identified a number of modifications that might serve to transform it into a reliable, precision machine.  I ordered all the materials and supplies we thought we needed for this undertaking so everything was ready to go for John to dive in to making these modifications a reality.

As a moment of review, the ripple molding machine is simply a contoured scraper being drawn across a length of wood, with either the scraper or the workpiece being undulated by some sort of linear pattern.  In short, a ripple molding is the result of controlled chatter.

In the case of this machine it is the cutter that remains fixed relative to the length of the frame, but which undulates up-and-down via a horizontal “follower” rod affixed to the cutterhead frame, pressing down on the pattern running the length of the machine frame.  We found in our earlier efforts that either the pattern or the follower ere being degraded and even destroyed by the very process of creating the moldings.

I do not know how this problem was dealt with historically, but for our applications we decided to replace the extant follower rod with a new rod and tiny roller bearings to instead ride along the pattern, transferring the up-and-down impulse without friction to the cutterhead.  John spent extensive time retrofitting the cutterhead to accommodate this modification without damaging or changing irrevocably the machine as it was presented to me.

After installing the new follower system John reported to me with a grand smile that it as a perfect solution to the problem, and would guide our design considerations as we move forward with new machines in both our futures.

Ukrainian pastry artist Dinara Kasko creates incredible-looking edible cakes that are inspired by geometry, architecture, sculpture, and technology. For a 2017 ‘ruby chocolate’ event in Shanghai, she made an 81 piece ruby chocolate cake using the Grasshopper graphical algorithm editor and a 3D printer to create silicone cake molds. Inspired by the paper sculptures of artist Matthew Shlian, each mousse, ganache, and meringue mini-cake was a different shape.

She also created a series of ‘Geometrical kinetic tarts’ in collaboration with Miami-based artist José Margulis:

In the video below, we can see how the cake model is designed and printed to make a silicone mold for her chocolate sponge, mousse, and cherry cake:

Kasko’s 3*3*3 sphere cake is dipped in a bright red glaze after it’s released from the mold. “Inside: pistachio sponge cake, raspberry mousse with rose, raspberry cream, confit raspberry – black currant.”

Kasko sells some silicone molds at DinaraKasko.com with corresponding cake recipes included.

h/t Designboom.

It’s like the Galaxy S5, but mini. Quick subtraction shows that the Galaxy S5 Mini shaved off 10.9 mm in height and 7.2 mm in width, but added 1.2 mm in thickness when compared to its larger brother. The Mini wasn’t just scaled down on the outside; the screen resolution, processor, RAM, and battery capacity all take a hit. But the question remains: does this minor change in size make a major difference in repairability?

Given its similar-but-smaller internal design compared with the big-brother S5, our European-sourced Galaxy S5 Mini scored the same 5 out of 10 on repairability. Yet, because this phone came from outside of the U.S., we saw a significant change in who provided the circuitry — instead of Qualcomm dominating the communications/power field, we saw some of the more international players, including TriQuint, R2 Semi, and Samsung’s own Shannon brand.

Teardown highlights:

• The Galaxy S5 Mini’s easily replaceable lithium-ion battery is rated at 2100 mAh, 3.85 V, and 8.09 Wh. That’s a 25% decrease in capacity from the Galaxy S5’s 2800 mAh battery — but then again, the iPhone 5S’s diminutive battery clocks in at just 1440 mAh.

• On the back of the display, with the home button still attached, we find a few points of interest:

• Cypress CYTMA545 TrueTouch Multi-Touch All-Points touchscreen controller
• 1200T E45H2 finger scanner controller
• Samsung-manufactured display assembly that’s labeled AMS447BS01

• After removing the daughterboard, we spy an extra antenna interconnect cable that wasn’t present in our Galaxy S5 teardown unit. We suspect this is for the Band 7 antenna (for European coverage). The green coax cable connects to the standard WCDMA and LTE bands, but Band 7 is LTE-only, and operates at 2.5 GHz — so it’s a separate antenna for better antenna performance.

• Time for Science with iFixit! Today we’re talking about Envelope Tracking. First developed in the 1930s to improve efficiency of high-power AM radio transmitters, Envelope Tracking is the continual monitoring and tuning of the power amplifier to match the power needed for the transmission, reducing wasteful excess energy supplied to the radio. To simplify: less wasted power for longer battery life and cooler operation. Our Euro Mini sports an R2 Semiconductor R2AA217C Envelope Tracking Modulator, which controls the TriQuint TQP9059S Power Amplifier. Of the few phones that support Envelope Tracking, this is the first we’ve seen that isn’t powered by a Qualcomm chip.

• What sort of chips can we find on this bite-sized motherboard? Let’s check ‘em out:

• Samsung K3QF5F50MM 1.5 GB DRAM, with the 1.4 GHz quad-core Exynos 3 Quad layered underneath. We hear the base band modem is also integrated into the apps processor, a first for a Galaxy phone sold outside of Korea.
• Toshiba THGBMBG7D2KBAIL 16 GB NAND Flash
• TriQuint TQP9059S Power Amplifier Module
• Broadcom BCM4334 Dual-Band 802.11n Wi-Fi/BT 4.0 +HS/FM Receiver Combo Chip
• Shannon 889 N7FT4AMZ Samsung-developed RFIC Transmitter/Receiver
• Broadcom BCM475201UB Integrated Multi-Constellation GNSS Receiver
• Wolfson Microelectronics WM1811AE Multi-Channel Audio Hub CODEC
• InvenSense M651M 6-Axis Accelerometer + Gyro
• 03418 01965 S3FWRN S41801 (the traces for this IC lead to the heart rate sensor, potentially making this the Biosensor Controller)

David Brooks wrote an excellent op-ed piece in reaction to the Atlantic article  The Confidence Gap. The Confidence Gap authors makes the argument that while there is some inequality between men and women in the workplace due to societal attitudes and such, much of it can be attributed to women’s lack of self-confidence relative to men.

While men are routinely over-confident, meaning they estimate their abilities to be far above what they actually are, women are under-confident, which means they routinely under-estimate their skills and abilities.

The article explicitly calls for women to be less self-effacing and more confident like their male counterparts so that they can achieve rewards commensurate with their actual abilities, not perceived abilities.

David Brooks doesn’t believe that women’s under-confidence is the problem, it is men’s over-confidence.

“So my first reaction when reading of female underconfidence is not simply that this is a problem. It’s to ask, how can we inject more of this self-doubt and self-policing into the wider culture. How can each of us get a better mixture of “female” self-doubt and “male” self-assertion?”

This struck a chord with me as my primary goal for Islam month is to develop humility, primarily to counter my naive overconfidence in some parts of my life that I believe have negative effects on me.

Brooks writes,

“The self-help books try to boost the “confidence” part of self-confidence, but the real problem is the “self” part. The self, as writers have noticed for centuries, is an unstable, fickle, vain and variable thing.”

Confidence today is overly associated with the self and one’s ego. Without linking confidence to some sort of external, task oriented criteria, it becomes abstract and almost meaningless.

“When you try to come up with a feeling for self-confidence, you are trying to peer into a myriad of ever-changing mental systems, most of them below the level of awareness. Instead of coming up with a real thing, which can reliably be called self-confidence, you’re just conjuring an abstraction. In the very act of trying to think about self-confidence, your vanity is creating this ego that is unstable and ethereal, and is thus painfully fragile, defensive, boasting and sensitive to slights.”

Now consider this passage from The Illuminated Prayer, a Sufi guide to Salat.

“The ‘I’ that so many have defended to their dying breath might be likened to a slightly unstable computer operating system. It’s got wonderful features, but it still crashes and needs regular upgrades. Ultimately, it is nothing more than a swarm of charged particles, or rather, it’s only the pattern of charges, completely ephemeral, subject at any moment  error messages, erasure, viruses, random power surges….even unfixable crashes.”

The “I” or “self” is inherently fragile, and rooting confidence in the self is destined to end poorly.

Brooks writes that confidence shoot be rooted in objective, external, criteria, rather than confusing notions of the self.

“The person with the self-confidence mind-set starts thinking about his own intrinsic state. The person who sees herself as the instrument for performing a task thinks about some external thing that needs doing. The person with the confidence mind-set is like the painfully self-conscious person at a dinner party who asks, ‘How am I coming across?’ The person with an instrumentalist mind-set is serving a craft and asks ‘What does this specific job require?’ The person with a confidence mind-set is told ‘Believe in yourself.’ This arouses all sorts of historical prejudices and social stereotypes. The person with an instrumentalist mind-set is told “Look accurately at what you have done.’”

Islam would agree that confidence should be rooted in something outside of the self, something external. However, Islam doesn’t suggest just picking any random task in which you can objectively measure your competence to build your confidence. Islam provides explicit guidelines on how to live your life in a just and moral manner. Islam says you should pray five time per day, donate 2.5% of your capital every year to worth causes, fast for one month every year, etc.

They also prescribe guidelines for how to conduct yourself in worldly affairs so that your actions in your day-to-day life are consistent with Islamic principles. Prayers are a reminder that you should live your life as if you were a servant to God, not a slave to your ego.

“Each of the prayers is said at a different strategic time so that no matter what we are doing or how busy we get, we are always aware that we either prayed a few hours ago or will pray again soon. This keeps the mind fresh and aware of our duty to God, and we become much less likely to want to break one of His laws.” – Yahiya Emerick

However, Islam goes beyond just serving God. The ultimate goal is to achieve complete dissolution of the self.

I believe most of us have this desire to “dissolve the self,” we just don’t recognize it. We might identify it as boredom, and think the solution is more entertainment. We might think it’s loneliness, and seek out a lover. We might identify it as a desire for the exotic, so we travel.

But I suspect that most of those desires are really a desire to dissolve the self and be one with God.

“A wicker basket sank in the Ocean, saw itself full of seawater, decided it could live independently. Left the ocean,

and a not a drop stayed in it.

But the ocean took it back. For God’s sake, stay near the sea! Walk the beach. Your face is pale.

I am sinking in the ocean of this subject.”

Like the wicker basket, we desire independence, but we cannot hold water. We are not designed to be separated from the ocean. It is only when we are subsumed by the ocean i.e. God, are we truly fulfilling our deepest needs.

The so-called confidence gap is really a symptom of a deeper problem. The problem is deeper than the problem of male hubris and female meekness; the problem is an excessive focus on the self and separation from the divine.

Men are separated from the divine by their over-confidence; women are separated from the divine by excessive worry about what others may think of them.

Instead of a confidence gap, perhaps we should call it the “God gap.”

The post Islam: Day 9 – Beyond the Confidence Gap appeared first on The Ancient Wisdom Project.

Like every good student, I dutifully (though grudgingly) practiced my scales from an early age.

Of course, once I was old enough to practice unsupervised, I happily avoided scales as often as I could get away with it. Like taking my vitamins, it was something that I knew would be good for me, but I wasn’t sure exactly why.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s, that the lights went on, and I discovered why I should have been practicing scales all along.

So why are scales and etudes worth our time?

Wow…

One summer many years ago, I spent a few weeks at a chamber music workshop where cellist Natalia Gutman was one of the coaches.

She held a master class for the cellists one day, and at one point did something that made all of us simply smile and shake our heads in admiration.

What was it?

She played a scale.

Up. Down. Arpeggios. One note to a bow. Eight. Sixteen. I think she even played the whole darn scale (up and down) in one bow.

Anyone can play a scale. But to play it with the kind of ease and effortlessness she demonstrated, with such precise yet organic and fluid bow distribution, control, evenness, smoothness, not to mention sparkling pure sound, clean shifts and intonation…sigh…

It left us speechless.

Scales may be the most basic sequence of sounds that musicians play, but observing a great artist’s mastery of the fundamentals was truly something to behold.

It dawned on me that sure, maybe I could whip off a mean Paganini Caprice on occasion, but I couldn’t come close to that kind of execution in a scale. As much as I wanted to dismiss the importance of scales at that moment, I finally realized why scales were so important and valuable.

Wherefore scales?

It dawned on me that scales aren’t just about putting in the time. They are a testing ground. An ideal laboratory or controlled environment for developing the fundamental building blocks of our technique. Smooth shifts. Bow speed, contact point, distribution. Quality and concept of sound. And much, much more.

It’s an opportunity to strip away the dozens of other variables we would otherwise encounter in a piece of music, and focus on mastering just one aspect of our technique in isolation. Then adding in the others, one at a time, to see how that changes things. So that we can tweak and experiment with the little tiny details and truly master the fundamentals.

Sort of like how some folks nowadays recommend teaching kids how to ride a bike by taking the pedals off the bicycle, so they can work on developing balance first. Then, when they’ve gotten the balancing part figured out, putting the pedals back on so they can work on maintaining balance while pedaling.

Whether it’s experimenting with finger pressure, point of contact, or how much bow hair to use, it’s less about playing the scale perfectly, and more about exploration, hypothesis testing, and building up a toolbox of fundamental skills that we can then apply to whatever unique combination of demands we might encounter in our repertoire.

Are fundamentals boring? At first glance maybe, but is it possible to be truly great without a solid grasp of the fundamentals?

The “Big Fundamental”

Case in point, Tim Duncan is often referred to as one of the most “boring” players in the NBA. But with five championships, 14 All-Star appearances, multiple MVP awards, and more, he is arguably one of the greatest players of all time.

Nicknamed the “Big Fundamental” by Shaquille O’Neal, he is also widely regarded as being one of the most fundamentally sound players in the league – a defining characteristic of his game that many credit for his enviable and continued success over the span of a 17-year career.

Like the saying “heaven is in the details,” it’s the little things that don’t show up on the highlight reel, but add up over the course of a game, season, and playoff series, that are often the difference between winning and losing.

The egg test

Whenever my parents would go to a new Japanese restaurant, my mom would always order an egg dish – typically the tamagoyaki or tamago sushi.

She said that this was the test of a good chef, and you could often tell if it was a top-notch restaurant or not based on this one dish.

Sweet eggs always tasted a bit funky to me, so I had to take her word for it, but it seems that this is a real thing – not just something my mom made up.

Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck has been said to test chefs with the “egg test” as well, noting that many chefs will be able to prepare fancy dishes with exotic ingredients at a high level, but be tripped up by a simple egg if they have neglected the fundamentals,

There’s also this moving scene in the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, where an apprentice recounts spending months trying to cook eggs to the satisfaction of the master. How it took him perhaps 200-plus attempts to get it just right.

Take action

So…can you pass the egg test on your instrument? Or the scale test, as it were?

What would it take to pass with flying colors?

The one-sentence summary

“What people don’t realize is that professionals are sensational because of the fundamentals.” ~12-time MLB All-Star, 1995 MVP, and 1990 World Series Champion shortstop Barry Larkin

photo credit: lumei via photopin cc

By Anna Hoeschen.
All photos by Caitlin Cooreman.

An American flag rests against a white brick wall in the Leather Works Minnesota studio. It keeps watch over the swivel knives and mallets, the sheets of chocolate leather and the metal sewing machines. Before the clamor for American Made, Kent and Lee Begnaud were making quality leather goods at home—in both the figurative and literal sense.

Kent’s Sewing Machine

Leather Works started in the Begnaud’s garage in 1999. They joke that their dining room table was shipping and receiving. A little over a year ago, the lean operation found a new home in St. Paul’s Historic Lowertown District. Their son, Nathan O’Malley, joined the team after graduating college. He has helped grow the brand and the business, contributing his talents as a maker and a marketer. Leather Works joined Instagram and started collaborating with other designers. Upcoming projects include partnerships with Shinola, Hackwith Design, and Fairbault Woolen Mills.The Begnauds also contribute to the Makers Coalition, a mix of local businesses and schools that seeks to revitalize industrial sewing and craftsmanship through education. Students are invited to use the machines and learn the craft of leather making at the Leather Works studio.

Leather Works Studio

The Begnauds credit their success to a gracious community of like-minded makers and followers, but it’s likely that no one would have bit if their products hadn’t been honest.

I’ve heard these terms before: an honest man, an honest wage, an honest living. And that’s the adjective that seems fitting for the ideas that Leather Works embodies and the objects they create. Leather is the perfect medium for their model. The tensile and agile qualities of the material—its ability to withstand and to last—are what made Leather Works.

I touch one of the Navigator Passport Wallets. It’s a deep mahogany color with beautiful cherry grains. It feels smooth and buttery. When I lightly scrape my nail across the surface, the fibers react, leaving a tiny broken line.

I love what this object represents. I love that it will acquire a certain worn beauty as it ages. I love that its stories may align with its intended use; it might traverse continents and cross borders. Maybe it will become like Nathan’s, who shows us a Navigator wallet filled with field notes. Perfect for a writer, a wanderer, or an artist.

Wallets

For anyone reading closely, pay attention to how this company grows and evolves.

The story gets better with time.

How did this all start?

Kent: I used to work for Leather Works back in the seventies. A buddy of mine from high school started it. It was just me and him … in the nineties we were doing mostly promotional products and he got bought out … the new owners came in and six months later they took the whole thing to China. So we said, let’s bring it back  A year ago in January we found this space, and it’s like a complete circle for me, because I’m just a couple of blocks from where it all started, back in the same neighborhood.

How did you become interested in leather making?

Kent: I have an art background … and it was everything that I liked, working with my hands and being creative, but you could actually build something that was functional. We’ve never been satisfied with our products. There’s something you can always polish a little more. And finding the right leather, that’s the key.

Nathan: I grew up doing it. I used to work out in the shop with them through middle school and high school to earn some extra money. My parents are artists. I would always say that growing up. I’ll say I was never really interested in the company until about three years ago, in my last year of college. [Leather Works] got really busy after Northern Grade, and asked me to come work. I kind of had a vision. I remember thinking, I want Leather Works to be as well-known as Red Wing boots.

Lee: And all through high school [Nathan] would always go out and alter his clothes. He picked up the sewing machine at a very young age. Which is neat, because Kent has always done sewing. And Kent’s father was a tailor.

Nathan O’Malley

What are your thoughts on American Made and the consumer response?

Kent: We don’t take it for granted. After fourteen years, we’re an overnight success. All of a sudden the economy got better and American Made became a movement. People are consuming a little better and a little less. You find the value in it, because you’re helping somebody make a living. That’s what I tell these guys. I want them to make a man’s wage. I don’t want them to have to come here and then do something else to make a living. I used to be bashful about it, but I’m not anymore, because this is what they have to be paid to be able to make it. It’s fair.

Lee: There are other leather companies that we work with. It’s just boomed in the past three or four years. We’re all splitting up work, so we can help each other. It’s not just American Made. People want to eat local and have chickens in their backyard. They want to hang clothes on the line and do things for quality rather than quantity.

Describe the process and the leathers.

Kent: We do all the die cutting, imprints, and assembly. This is our hot stamper which came off the Mayflower, as you can see. We heat it up to about 350 degrees. We use a heat tape to mount it, and there’s a removable plate that we can use to position the dies. We also control the thickness of the leather with a splitting machine. There’s a huge scrap factor with leather. A lot of them have the brands on them. The belly is the softer grain. Typically, we’re fighting against brand marks, healed scars, or tick bites.

Nathan O’Malley and Caitlin Cooreman

What is it like to work with your family?

Kent: The first few years it was just Lee and I. She called me Pharaoh and I called her Houdini, because she said I was a hard task master, and I said I could never find her. She was disappearing all the time. I can honestly say it’s the greatest thing that we get to spend a lot of time together. And Nathan’s great. He’s the best.

You have four kids?

Kent: Five. And eight grandchildren.

Stores around the world sell your products. How do you build and sustain those relationships?

Kent: It’s so cool, because they see your story first of all. And that’s what they’re looking for, and they like the story of who’s making what. We just got a store in Oslo, Norway because a guy from Norway bought a product online.  And [Lee] was emailing him, and she goes, I’m Norwegian. And he goes what’s your maiden name, and she tells him. And he says I live six miles from them; that’s a family that lives in this region. So she just got back from a two week trip to Norway.

We were down in Kansas City a few weeks ago, and we were in the Baldwin Shop. They don’t have any belts in their store, which I found odd, because they sell blue jeans. And one of the guys pulls out his Leather Works wallet and belt. They were friends with our son-in-law who owns a coffee shop in Kansas City. We love that.

Lee: We don’t want the stores to be so flooded that they have the same stuff. For us, it’s really important to have that exclusivity. Even like the new store in Oslo; he is a very cool guy. Several of the people from Parliament come get their shoes from him, and we have told him that you have an exclusivity from us.

Nathan: But we actually do have a plan to take over the world by 2020.

Kent: This is phase two.

Nathan, Kent, and Lee

Details:

Leather Works: www.leatherworksminnesota.com
Shinola: www.shinola.com
Hackwith Design: hackwithdesignhouse.com
Fairbault Woolen Mills: www.faribaultmill.com
Makers Coalition: www.themakerscoalition.org
Baldwin Denim: www.baldwindenim.com
Caitlin Cooreman: caitlincooreman.com/places

The post Profile: Leather Works Minnesota appeared first on handful of salt.

On a recent trip to Paris with my better half we naturally saw all of the fabulous sights that one would expect; the Eiffel tower (did you know Gustave Eiffel was not only a civil engineer but also an aerodynamicist?), the Louvre and my favourite large space on this planet; Le Musée D’Orsay. But, despite my deep and abiding love of the Art Nouveau that the D’Orsay contains, the highlight of this trip was exploring a much less well known (and entirely separate) museum: Les Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a museum of the decorative arts and design, located in the Palais du Louvre’s western wing, known as the Pavillon de Marsan, at 107 rue de Rivoli. It is filled with a dizzying array of 150,000 objects, the collections are testaments to the French art of living, the savoir-faire of French craftsmen and industrialists, the research and creativity of its artists. Pity our North American cousins who have to cross the Atlantic to savour this treat and enjoy some of the finest furniture available to view on the planet.

The museum boldly claims that there is not a single technique, material or type of object that cannot be found in the Arts Décoratifs inventories: tiepin, escritoire, doll’s house, scenic wallpaper, stained glass, wood, enamel, plastic, shark’s skin and amaranth…the list is extensive. Many criteria governed the selection of some 6,000 objects for permanent display (including thousands of pieces of furniture), demonstrating their use, economy, craftsmanship, prowess and symbolism.

If you have visited Paris before and want a new experience or, if you are new to the city and don’t mind standing slack jawed at the construction and finishing techniques on display – this is a great place to take a look at the development of French and particularly Parisian furniture where the trade was divided among myriad craft guilds.

Of course the whole thing can only be enhanced with a copy of Don William’s magnificent translation of the first volume of A.J. Roubo’s ‘L’Art du Menuisier’ to hand back at the hotel for reference…

- Paul Mayon

Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational has created an awesome free printable card game that helps kids learn all about the geography and history of the states.

Battle of the States is played a little bit like “War” but by comparing numbers and dates related to the states such as population, number of counties, electoral votes and year of statehood.

One nice thing about it is that it is slightly skewed in favor of younger players, since they start the game and pick the category to compare first.  The player who has the higher number in that category gets both cards and gets to choose the next category.  The player with the most cards at the end wins.

I’m hoping to try the game with at least a few of my kiddos once I find enough cardstock to print them out.  I seem to have been raided by small crafters lately. 

(The following article is based upon research I recently had the opportunity to complete at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.  I am indebted to Julia Rossi and Nicolas Ricketts at the museum for their tremendous help, to Dan Blum for arranging a tour of the museum, and to Wei-Hwa Huang and Michael Tsuk for their help in preparing this article.)

One of the least appreciated elements of the board game industry is the development of games.  One reason it’s not well appreciated is that it’s largely invisible; there’s no good way a buyer can differentiate a good game that was delivered to the publisher ready to go from one delivered with major holes that the publisher had to resolve in order to bring the game to market.

Interestingly, the rise of Kickstarter™ as a method for publishing games has given the public a somewhat better understanding of the process.  The great advantage of Kickstarter™ – the ability to bring games to market that otherwise might not be published – is also its great weakness.  Most games on Kickstarter™ are not developed, but simply marketed; most aren’t even vetted by a publisher.  This approach certainly _can_ lead to a good game.  In spite of all of the complaints about Kickstarter™-funded games, most would agree that it has lead to the publication of strong designs, at least on occasion.  But typically it relies entirely upon the designer to bring the game to a desirable end state.

To be fair, however, many publishers don’t really focus on development either.  This has an advantage to the game buyer over Kickstarter™, in that a publisher will have vetted the game – though of course this does limit the choice of the consumer.  But – again, there is often reliance upon the designer to have optimized the game, with the publisher focusing on manufacturing and theme.

There are a number of exceptions, however – and none greater than the German publisher Hans im Glück.  They _actively_ rework designs; more than any other publisher I’m familiar with they are willing to completely rework a game in order to get more out of the central design that was submitted.  This direction clearly started with Bernd Brunhofer, who founded the company, but has spread throughout the staff.  This makes playtesting their games a real treat, as they are open to much broader changes than most publishers.

This is not to say that Hans im Glück always gets the development right.  A friend once described the final step of the processes, when it’s time to get the game to the market, as Bernd Brunhofer tossing all of the ideas that have been created in the development of the game into the air, and publishing what comes down.  But if you look at the success the company has enjoyed – including six Spiel des Jahres winners^[i] – it’s clear that they’re doing something right.

It’s easier to point to the impact of game development by noting specific examples I had the privilege of playing during their development.  Perhaps the best example is the company’s most popular game, Carcassonne.  When I first played the game, no pieces were returned to players during the game.  This worked perfectly fine – but led to a significantly less interesting game than the one that was finally published, as the need to cycle pieces back mixed with the inability to bring back some pieces leads to a far more interesting game, as there are more frequent and more interesting decisions to make.

Another good example is Müll + Money, released in English as Industrial Waste.  This game was pitched to Hans im Glück by a first-time (and so far one-time) game designer as a tool for focusing attention on the environment impact of manufacturing.  When I played the game, it was felt to be near completion – but even so, the game underwent a great simplification before publication, leaving the interesting core intact while shortening the game length and simplifying the math.

Of course, there are lots of “good” games in the world.  The various organizations that reward excellence in games – the Spiel des Jahres jury, Games Magazine, the Cannes Festival International des Jeux, and so on – have no difficulty in finding many strong candidates each year.  But more rarely, a perennial is released – a game which will sell well not only when released, but for decades after.  Games such as Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride have a substantial impact upon the lives of the designers and the fortunes of their publishers.

But rarer still are the games which establish a new segment for the board game industry.  Magic: The Gathering is such a game, having catapulted collectable card games into the public spotlight.  Dungeons and Dragons is another, as is Tactics.  But the genre-creating game which had the greatest impact for me personally is Acquire, the game which established the adult strategy game market.

Acquire, for anyone not familiar with the game, is a stock market game – but unlike most stock market games, one where player actions impact stock prices rather than random factors.  Here, players form, grow, and merge hotel chains, earning money (and the opportunity to sell stock) only when mergers occur.  Players receive money for the most and second-most stock in the chain being merged away, and can hold, trade, or sell their stock.  As a result of this lack of freedom to sell stock at will, money can be very tight in the middle of the game.  Eventually, when one chain reaches size 41 or all chains reach size 11 or larger, the game ends.  Final majority and second place stockholder bonuses are awarded, players are paid for their stock, and the player with the most cash wins.  The game has inspired many other games, including Wolfgang Kramer’s Big Boss.  I wonder if it had any influence on 1829, which took the idea of other game actions driving stock prices much further.

I was first exposed to Acquire when I was about twelve years old, when my family visited friends of my parents.  Their son, who was about five years older than I, brought out Acquire and roped my brother and me into playing the game.  And in the course of that play, my whole opinion of games changed.  I’d always thought of games as largely a children’s activity; games were ceasing to be interesting to me.  But Acquire changed my mind; I was ready to consider games as an ongoing hobby, rather than a childhood passion.  I soon acquired a copy, and it was regularly played with my friends.  I was very disappointed when I purchased the Apple II version of the game, only to discover that it didn’t actually provide an automatic, computer-controlled player such as in contemporary games Lords of Conquest or M.U.L.E., but was merely a moderator which tracks player holdings.

While I didn’t play any games often during college, I did continue to pull out Acquire on occasion, and when I returned to gaming, Acquire was one of the games I returned to.  I was very happy to get a copy of the game with wood tiles, in the days of rec.games.board.marketplace, and I was soon playing the game regularly again.

A number of years later, I heard of a famous and rare “World Map” edition of the game, published by 3M, the original publisher of Acquire.  I eventually managed to track down a copy.  And then I discovered, much to my surprise, a completely different set of rules.  Instead of 25 shares in each hotel, the number of shares varied from 22 to 35.  And players were _dealt_ shares at the start of the game – and then limited to the purchase of a single share per turn.  These differences were fascinating – but made for a less interesting game than the one I knew.  And, even more unusually, there was a mystery in the game – by all indications, the World Map edition had to precede the standard wood tile edition – but the copyright on the back of the World Map edition was 1963, as compared to 1962 for the wood tile edition.  I didn’t worry too much about this, but it was odd.

Then, in 2012, I decided to play Acquire 50 times for the 50^th anniversary of the game’s release.  I kept some statistics from my plays, and discovered quite a bit more about the game as a result.  It wasn’t surprising, but the game ended a roughly equal number of times due to each of the end game conditions – and about a tenth of the time on both conditions simultaneously.  Much more startling was the fact that the average game of Acquire has 7 mergers, with 70% of games including 6-8 mergers; I would have guessed that there were significantly more.  (For more information about the 50 games, see http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/98294/50-plays-of-acquire-in-2012.) But again, this quest lead to a mystery – Rick Heli asked what day Acquire was actually published.  I didn’t know, and I had no good ideas as to how I might find the information.

Sid Sackson was a most meticulous man.  I’d somewhat known this, from various articles I’d read about him over the years, but it wasn’t until I had the opportunity to see his diaries and files at the Strong National Museum of Play that I realized just how organized he was.  His diaries contain a wealth of information – but also an index, making then easy to navigate.  And his files are a marvel; he drafted his letters by hand, and retained those copies of all of his correspondence, allowing for easy reconstruction of discussions that took place half of a century ago.

In tracing the history of Acquire, however, there is one disappointment – his diaries only go back to 1963.  I had previously read something of the game’s history, however; the game had its roots as a war game, named Lotto War.^[ii]  So after inquiring about earlier diaries, I was disinclined to spend a large amount of time looking though the Sackson collection – until Chris Kovac saw a note in the 1963 diary, on October 11, stating “Signed Contract for Acquire (Vacation)”.^[iii]  That didn’t jive with the game having been published in 1962 – and as a result, I spent the next 90 minutes going through Sackson’s correspondence with 3M and other material, looking to understand the timeline of Acquire.  What follows is my understanding of that timeline.

It’s not possible to say just when the design that became Acquire started, from the information available, but by the time it was ready to show to 3M, the title he was using for the game was Vacation.^[iv]  Sackson heard of the line of games 3M was planning to produce on March 26, 1963^[v], and showed them Acquire (under the title of Vacation) on April 2, 1963.^[vi]  This clearly precludes the notion that 3M published the game in 1962 – but then why does the box have a copyright date of 1962?  My initial theory was that 3M had received the game in 1962 and the date was the copyright for the artwork, but that is clearly not supported by the diary entry on April 2^nd.  Looking through more of Sackson’s 1963 diary, however, a plausible explanation becomes obvious – Sackson likely registered a copyright for his rules for Acquire in 1962, and the date was used for the cover art.  It’s also possible that the date was used to align with the three earlier 3M games, Twixt, Oh-Wah-Ree, and Phlounder – games that had already received test marketing editions at the time that Sackson showed Acquire to 3M.

The path from 3M looking at Acquire to their decision to publish the game was rather straightforward.  On May 17 – six weeks after they first saw the game – 3M sent Sackson a payment to hold the game for further evaluation.^[vii]  About a month later, Sackson heard that 3M wanted to make changes in Vacation to reduce the cost of publishing.^[viii]  Unfortunately, there’s no direct record of those changes, though later correspondence suggests the likely nature of those changes.  There’s no further mention of the game until September, when Sackson writes that 3M wanted to test market Vacation, under the name of Acquire.^[ix]  The only real issue to come up during this time was when Sackson, though his agent Alice Nichols, received the proposed contract; it put a cap on royalty payments at $25,000 and a reduction in royalties by 80% if a knock-off game impacted sales.^[x]  These issues were quickly resolved, and Sackson signed the contract for Acquire on October 11, 1963.^[xi]

Production of the test marketing copies of Acquire was nearly complete at the beginning of November^[xii] – there are advantages to controlling one’s own manufacturing.  3M planned to test market the game in eight cities: Shreveport, New Orleans, Saint Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Madison, Milwaukee, and Denver, with full color newspaper ads in the New Orleans, Saint Louis, and Denver newspapers.^[xiii]  Copies of the ads were sent to Sackson, and are rather fascinating in and of themselves – particularly the picture of all five games lined up, all at different heights and widths.^[xiv]  One of the important revelations I had when looking through the history of Acquire was that the “test marketing” copies 3M referred to are, in fact, what is commonly known as the “World Map” edition of Acquire.  This was confirmed in a letter from Sackson to 3M, referring to the test marketing edition but offering specific comments about the World Map edition rules.^[xv]

To understand Sackson’s comments about the World Map rules, one needs to first be familiar with the differences from the familiar rules for Acquire.  First, the most important difference – on a turn, one (and only one) share of stock may be bought.  However, in compensation, each player is dealt their share of 60 stock certificates at random before the game begins.  To further complicate matters, the number of shares in each chain is unique, ranging from 22 up to 35, and players are not awarded shares for founding a new chain.  There are other minor differences, such as Continental being one of the inexpensive chains, but that’s the majority of the differences.^[xvi]

There are two other key points to make about World Map Acquire before proceeding to the process by which it transformed into the Acquire we know today.  First, it’s important to note that World Map Acquire _is_, in essence, the game that Sackson submitted to 3M.  This is clear from one diary entry made shortly after receiving his copy, noting that the changes to the payout chart worked well.^[xvii]  The lack of comment on other changes implies that there were no other changes; the test marketing edition is, in fact, nearly identical to the game he submitted eight months prior.  The second matter worth looking at is the number of copies printed.  There is no definitive information in Sackson’s papers to give this data, but there is a trail of breadcrumbs.  Sackson received three royalty payments for Acquire prior to the broad release of the better known edition.^{[xviii] [xix] [xx]}  Unfortunately, these statements don’t reference the number of copies sold, but only the net sales, which totaled $2368.91.  Fortunately, we do know the retail price of the test marketing edition of Acquire from the newspaper article; it ran for $6.98.^[xxi]  Given my limited knowledge of game distribution at the time, my best guess is that the net price was approximately 2/3 of the retail price, which suggests that 500 copies of the test marketing edition were printed.  If one assumes a lower net price, it’s possible that 750 copies, or even 1000, were produced, but based upon all available information I would suggest that 500 is most likely.  It’s also worth noting that Sackson’s advance on royalties, as listed in his royalty payments, was $75.^[xxii]

In establishing the publication date for Acquire, I spoke with Zev Schlesinger of Z-Man Games.  He mentioned that from his point of view, there is no such thing as a “publication date”, but rather just a printing date and a street date.  But he did say that he would not consider a test marketing edition for these dates.  The publication date, in his view, would be when the intended printing hit the market.

Having now detailed the path to the production of the test marketing edition of Acquire, the next step – and the most interesting part of the story, for me – is going through the game’s journey to the Acquire we know and love still today.  This is where Sackson’s habit of drafting his letters – and saving the drafts – makes all the difference; as a result it’s possible to follow nearly the whole path.

Sackson’s first letter to Bill Caruson, a Product Merchandiser at 3M who was heavily involved with the company’s entry into the game industry, upon receiving his first copy of the test marketing game, is focused on improving the rules of World Map Acquire, as opposed to changes to the game.^[xxiii]  He mentions a rule apparently under discussion previously, where at one point the hotel chain marker _replaced_ the hotel marker on the board; as a result of that rule having been removed, there is an inconsistency in the World Map rules.  The other corrections were incorrect numbers (likely the result of changes to the payouts) along with a strategy tip and emphasis on the short duration of the game Sackson wished to see added.

The real changes started to occur when Caruson suggested a few changes to World Map Acquire.^[xxiv]  The first suggestion was to not distribute any stock at the start of the game, but to give each player an additional $3,000.  The second change is to allow players to purchase as much stock as they want on a turn – a suggestion most Acquire players can recognize immediately as an awful idea.  Finally, Caruson suggests placing the tiles used to determine turn order directly onto the board; previously, players added them to their original hand of tiles.  Caruson also notes that he feels the game plays better with four players than with more, particularly with his suggested variations.

Sackson’s reply is completely professional – an impressive achievement given how silly the idea of allowing unlimited stock purchases was.^[xxv]  He starts by agreeing that removing the dealing out of shares makes sense; he explains that he intended that the “shares” represent influence, rather than stock, but agrees to the change.  He claims “strong objections” to unlimited purchases, and gives a detailed description of the effect of the rule with his group, where the first player founded a chain and bought 12 certificates, the second bought 6 in the same chain, the third founded another chain an bought 12 additional shares, and so on.  This completely eliminated the interest in trading 2-for-1, save for any financial gain.  Later in the game, a player would start a chain and buy all of the shares, to collect both the first and second place bonuses.  Sackson proposed reducing the number of shares in each company, to a range of 18-30, and awarding two free shares to a player founding a company, returning the number of shares a player may purchase to one.  However, to add variety players would be required to found companies in a randomly determined order, though companies which have been merged away may be restarted in preference to the next in line.  One of the classic disagreements regarding Acquire is whether player’s stock holdings should be kept so that all players can see them, or “open”, or if they should be hidden, or “closed”.  Of particular interest in the open-versus-closed holdings debate is a suggestion from Sackson that, as there are no certificates dealt out and therefore no unknown factors, players should fan their shares so that everyone knows exactly where they stand at all times.  Sackson also noted uncertainty as to what happened when the initial turn-order tiles form chains; he suggested letting the first player name them.  However, he was concerned that in general this change gave the first player a considerable advantage, and recommended against the change – but admitted that he did not feel strongly about it.

The next correspondence between Sackson and Caruson followed a call between Alice Nichols and Caruson.^[xxvi]  Sackson notes that with continued testing of his rules, he’s found that a player not able to form chains is effectively eliminated from the game.  To address this, he suggests offering a bonus to the player causing the merger of two shares (actually, he crosses out shares and calls them blocks) in the surviving company, so long as that company is not safe before the takeover.  A safe chain, merged into, provides a bonus of one share.  To try to better balance the luck, Sackson suggests adding a set of 25 stock option cards, and giving players an additional $2,000 to start.  The stock option cards are shuffled and dealt to the players, and kept secret until used.  One additional stock can be purchased, on a player’s turn, by turning in one stock option.  Also of interest is Sackson’s suggestion that the tiles might be replaced by pressed board, or even cardboard, so long as tile racks are added – a suggestion 3M never acted upon, but coincidentally carried out by Avalon Hill decades later.

Caruson’s return letter is, in and of itself, not very revealing.^[xxvii]  Caruson reports that Acquire is “one of the best games” 3M’s test panels have ever played.  But, he notes, the basic concept of Acquire is so sound that “it doesn’t seem to make too much difference what we do to change the rules”.  He attaches a copy of the rules, and notes the intent to have a full production model available approximately August 15.  The rules Caruson references would look very familiar to anyone familiar with early editions of Acquire – it’s only when one looks carefully that one notices any differences.^[xxviii]  Sackson’s reply was almost immediate, trying to address a number of small but critical issues with the rules.^[xxix]  He noted that the purchase of shares was not explicitly after playing a tile, and requested a clarification.  He also pointed out that the order for disposal of stock after a merger is important, and recommended starting with the player who caused the merger.  Finally, he noted that it was not explicitly detailed what happens when there’s a tie for second place, or what happens if the a split bonus results in a spare $50 going to each player.  It’s worth noting that the first and third of these rules were clear in World Map Acquire, and simply had become uncertain as the rules developed.  All three rules were corrected before the game was published.^[xxx]

That effectively ends the story of how Acquire came to be, in the form the game is known today.  It’s not at all clear how the limit of three purchases a turn came to be, or when Caruson decided upon a flat 25 shares per company, but it is clear that the game went through significant and critical development between when Sackson submitted the game and when it came to finally be published, and that Bill Caruson played a major role in making the game a classic.  It’s worth noting that the game was immediately and significantly popular; given the previous assumption about the net sale price, the net sales for the third quarter of 1964 (when the game was first available) show sales of more than 3,500 copies^[xxxi], and fourth quarter sales topped 12,000.^[xxxii]  Those numbers would be impressive for a new release today – and also point to the fact that Acquire was really published for the first time in a general edition in 1964, not 1962, regardless of the date on the box.

So – is there a way for the level of development that occurred with Acquire to happen in the age of Kickstarter™?  Some publishers certainly do develop their games at that level – if not going so far as the publication of test marketing editions. And some games go through significant development – Dominion, published by Rio Grande Games, being a good example.  But could this be extended to more games?  It certainly would add to the expense of publishing a game, which in an industry with margins as thin as often seen with board games, is a real issue.  Though if the results are similar to those seen with Acquire, the costs could certainly be justified.

But a far larger issue would be finding a developer who can do as well as Caruson did with Acquire – particularly given that it’s clear that he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, even if in the end he got things right.  If a respected game developer can drive greater sales, the cost would be justified – but it’s not at all clear how one can become a respected game developer (at least at a level as to drive increased sales).  There are certainly developers whose involvement would increase my interest in a game – but they’re already involved with publishers.  Such a developer might be able to do better for themselves as an independent, but given that Kickstarter™ projects already seem to have little trouble attracting supporters – at least for the designs far enough along to benefit from development – it would seem to be a huge risk.  But perhaps someone will find a way to make it work, and join the ranks of Caruson and Brunnhofer.

^{[i] “Hans im Glück Verlag” Wikipedia: Die freie Enzykolpädie.  Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.  28 August 2013.  Web.  27 April 2014. <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_im_Gl%C3%BCck_Verlag&gt;
[ii] Costello, Matthew J.   The Greatest Games of All Time.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1991.  Print.
[iii] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  October 11 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[iv] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  March 27 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[v] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  March 26 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[vi] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  April 2 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[vii] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  May 17 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[viii] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  June 11 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[ix] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  September 9 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[x] Alice C. Nichols to Mark W. Gehan, September 20 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xi] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  October 11 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xii] Bill Caruson to Sackson, November 1 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xiii] Caruson to Nichols, November 1 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xiv] 3M; Bookshelf Games Advertisement, Saint Louis Post Dispatch.  8 December 1963  Reproduction.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xv] Sackson to Caruson, December 13 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xvi] 1963 Acquire Rules.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xvii] Sackson, Sidney.  Diary.  December 13 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xviii] R. D. Ebbott to Sackson, January 20 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xix] R. D. Ebbott to Sackson, April 20 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xx] R. D. Ebbott to Sackson, July 20 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxi] 3M; Bookshelf Games Advertisement, Saint Louis Post Dispatch.  8 December 1963  Reproduction.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxii] R. D. Ebbott to Sackson, January 20 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxiii] Sackson to Caruson, December 13 1963.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxiv] Caruson to Sackson, February 21 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxv] Sackson to Caruson, March 1 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxvi] Sackson to Caruson, June 3 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxvii] Caruson to Sackson, July 30 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxviii] How To Play Acquire …high adventure in high finance.  1964 rules (copyright 1963).  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxix] Sackson to Caruson, August 5 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxx] 1964 Acquire Rules.  3M.
[xxxi] K. A. Michaelson to Sackson, October 20 1964.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong
[xxxii] K. A. Michaelson to Sackson, January 20 1965.  Sid Sackson collection, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong}

It’s tradition for the senior class at my daughter’s high school to conclude every academic year by playing a game called Assassins.  Students team up and run around town ambushing each other with water guns and balloons in all hours of the day and night.  Anything is fair game short of playing on campus or actually breaking into homes.  Heaven knows how honest these kids are at reporting “kills.”  Anyway, my daughter just finished this game.  Aside from a couple of low-risk forays with her “platoon,” she pretty much spent the entire month holed up in our house as if it were Helm’s Deep.  She posted notes at all doors warning the rest of the family from unwittingly allowing entrance to any of her “friends.”  She refused to take her dog out except in our fenced backyard, hoping that no one had super soaker, I suppose.  She closed the overhead door every time she needed to go in the garage.  She even convinced my wife to trade parking spots with her so she wouldn’t have to get out in the driveway (I’m the first to admit that my daughter pretty much has me wrapped around her finger, but there was no way I was giving up my spot in the garage an entire month for a silly game).  She never got shot.  But neither did she win.

In sports, there’s a common phrase often uttered: “They didn’t play to win, they played not to lose.”  In fact, it’s usually an epitaph.  There are some interesting studies suggesting that athletes and teams tend to play tighter or more conservatively when the pressure is on, expectations are high, leads are comfortable, or there is little to gain.  Conversely, these same studies reflect how competitors are inclined to be more aggressive or take more risks in scenarios where they are way behind or have nothing to lose.  As an avid college football fan, I’ll spare our readers with specific historical anecdotes.  Suffice it to say, many of the biggest comebacks in sports occur when the leading team switches plans mid-game from one that earned the lead to one that tries to protect it.  And some of the largest upsets in history happen when the favorite goes in just trying to minimize mistakes, while the underdog comes out petal-to-the-metal and ears pinned back.

The “play not to lose” mentality can influence many areas of board gaming.  Obviously, world championships and millions of dollars aren’t on the line.  Nonetheless, it is an interesting characteristic to examine.  How common is it?  Do you ever find yourself playing not to lose and, if so, when?  Should designers incorporate such inclinations, or maybe consider how to enhance or minimize such passive strategies?  After all, as I’ll note further below, some games even have mechanisms that seemingly force you into a reactive strategy in order “not to lose.”

First, exactly what does “playing not to lose” look like in tabletop gaming?  For context, my definition tends toward: “making a low-risk or less-than-optimal move in order to protect your established position, reduce your own losses, preempt an opponent’s action, and/or impede his/her progress, at the same time without making any significantly direct personal gains towards a victory condition.”  So, in just what kinds of scenarios might this style of play arise?

One of the more obvious play-not-to-lose ploys is “turtling.”  This is generally only in the purview of war gaming and refers to building up a strong defense, while engaging in little to no offense.  Sometimes it is employed to protect gains or build up strength; and there may be times where its limited use can prove effective.  The infamous Antipodean strategy in Risk is ubiquitous and usually successful.  Hunkering “Down Under” for several turns nets few immediate gains toward the goal of world domination; but your opponents will weaken each other while you build up strength waiting for the right moment to strike.  However, taken to its extreme, turtling can essentially lead to the development of an impregnable defense – so that none can defeat you – which nonetheless remains too weak to achieve your victory conditions.

In most cases, the motivation behind turtling is simply to avoid loss of either troops or resources.  But war games do not hold a monopoly in such aversions.  They are found in Euro games, as well, and usually revolve around the risk of losing victory points – or falling behind in them.  Any time that a player employs a tactic or move which does not directly or optimally benefit them, that individual may be “playing not to lose.”  Rather than taking a positive step forward, such actions tend to be reactionary or passive in order to protect something, impede an opponent, or reduce risk.  Sure, there is merit in the argument that defensive measures have value and can serve a broader strategy.  But there is also a tested truism that the best defense is a good offense.

There are a variety of ways that playing not to lose may manifest itself in board games.  For example, players in Small World might target individual opponents – specifically perceived leaders – rather than concentrating on territories that will exploit their race’s unique abilities and traits.  Essentially, they are playing just as much to impede another as they are in maximizing their own points.  In limited fashion, this very may well be a sound strategy.  Concentrate on it too much, however, and you risk playing not to lose.

There are similar instances in innumerable titles.  A few examples here should suffice for illustration.  In Citadels, you may opt to take a role which does not benefit you very much simply to a) deprive another of it whom you know wants it, or b) keep it from another whom you know will likely use it against you.  In 7 Wonders, you may decide against playing a favorable card to your own tableau because you know that your neighbor will benefit from it, also.  In Thurn & Taxis, you can find yourself taking a town card that doesn’t advance your own routes, but will deprive another’s.  Again, in these cases, infrequent use may be reasonable.  However, falling back on them too often is generally not an approach in playing to win.

Another common play-not-to-lose tactic is especially prevalent in worker placement games in the form of “blocking.”  Many designs within this genre limit their action selection spaces to one piece or player.  Therefore, you can deprive an opponent of a particular place by “beating them” to it.  While it’s possible to personally benefit just as much as it is to hamper another, there are also instances in which you might do so simply to keep it from opponents, without yielding much in return.  In Kingsburg, you could choose an adviser that grants soldiers, even if you have adequate numbers already.  This thwarts other players from getting them, which could then cause said players to lose points from battle losses at the end of a round.  However, the play-to-win tactic would be to concentrate instead on your positive needs and select advisers who will net positive gains toward collecting resources and/or earning points.  Ticket to Ride, while not worker placement, can also witness similar maneuvers whereby players block one another to prevent progress, yet not make much of their own, either.

A further manifestation of playing not to lose is from the fear of setting up an opponent.  This is perhaps most evident in abstract, capture games like Checkers, Chess, and Go.  Players may take more cautious, less-optimal moves to avoid giving their opponent a favorable advantage.  Now, this give-and-take is very much a part of strategy in abstract games, yet taken to an extreme it only leads to stalemate.  So it can be difficult to discern when such tactics are completely natural or are indeed playing not to lose.  Still the concept can be seen in Euro games, too.  In Milestones players collect resources individually, but expend them to build roads, markets, and houses on a communal board.  The kicker is that every one is very much building on the progress of each other.  Rather than build for maximum points, you can often build “defensively” with a lesser action that does not set-up an opponent for a big score.

Interestingly, some designs build in a mechanism which seems to force sub-optimal, play-not-to-lose moves.  Invariably, it is in the form of a penalty.  If you don’t address this element, then you lose points.  The most notorious examples may be from games that require players to feed their “people,” as in Agricola or Stone Age, or suffer attrition.  In Western Town, individuals need to spend resources and/or actions to acquire cowboys for defense against Indian raids, or lose buildings (similar to the need for soldiers in Kingsburg).  In Amerigo, you must have cannons for protection against pirates.  In each case, you are obligated to perform specific actions whose sole purpose is to prevent some penalty or loss – i.e., playing not to lose.

Western Town. If you don’t spend resources and actions to get Cowboys, then these Indians wreak all kinds of havoc on your town – and preventing that penalty is all that Cowboys do.

The concept isn’t unique to board games, but also found in other forms of table top gaming.  The strategy behind constructing “balanced” decks in CCG’s could be viewed as a play not to lose mentality.  Many gamers, even tournament players, will often construct well-rounded Magic or Pokémon (and, etc.) decks that aren’t as powerful, but defend against an extremely wide range of other deck types that they may encounter – a Jack-of-all-trades deck, but King of none.  The opposing approach, instead, is to create an extremely powerful deck concentrating in one category which can quickly overcome many opponents, even though it may prove weak when matched against very specific types or unique, rarely-seen builds.

Even in role-playing games, some players may tend to act cautiously with beloved characters in particularly dangerous situations.  They tend to minimize risk of loss, impairment, and even death by avoiding such encounters, though the ability to pursue alternate courses will largely depend on what freedoms the game master grants.  The idea has ported over to the  RPG-based Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.  In that design, exploring can be rewarding, but also very dangerous, even risking death.  If a player’s character is near death, especially one he/she is chiefly attached to, the play-not-to-lose action is simply not to explore.  In campaign mode, stats are recovered by the next game.  If you didn’t win, you still didn’t lose.

If you find yourself playing not to lose, when you should be playing to win, first assess the reason why.  Typically there are two.  If it’s because you’re trying to impede the leader or slow him/her down in an attempt to catch up, make sure you’re still gaining ground in the process.  Otherwise you may be leaving “points on the table” with no discernable progress.  Still take advantage of opportunities and calculated risks, but it may behoove you more to concentrate on actions that maximize your own points.  If, on the other hand, you’re trying to protect a lead, beware going on autopilot.  Defend when appropriate, but don’t stop attacking.  Remember, always play the game where you want to be, not where your are.

There may be acceptable times to employ play-not-to-lose tactics.  Employing less-than optimal moves or even ones that gain you absolutely nothing just to defend your position or deny benefits to opponents can be a viable part of strategy.  However, resorting to that mentality in the long-term will usually prove more disadvantageous.  That’s because it is reactionary by nature, often based on what others are doing rather than your personal goals.  Nevertheless, are there times that you find yourself playing not to lose?  If so, when and why?

By Regina Connell.

John Wiggers‘s wood work—meticulous, rigorous, luxuriously and sumptuously crafted—is an absolute embodiment of his obstinate sense of integrity and his inability to tolerate BS.

Sweating the details

And it’s won him commissions throughout the world (currently: desks for executives in London and New York, a pyramid box in Australia) and has been featured in galleries and 5-star hotels like the Four Seasons and the Mandarin Oriental. Over the years, he’s also collaborated with Dakota Jackson and Lee Weitzman.

John Wiggers

It’s also caused him to approach his business from a different perspective.

But it hasn’t always been this way. John’s career has traced the same trajectory that many high-end makers have faced over the years. In the old days (and for some today), marketing used to consist of making something fabulous, building up a portfolio, then getting onto the radar of gallerists or showrooms who had relationships with interior design clients and well-heeled customers—et voila: pieces would be sold and commissions would be undertaken. Along the way, the gallerists/showrooms and interior designers would take their cut. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Mother of pearl detail

Now, however, things are different, due in large part to that great leveler, the web. Galleries and showrooms struggle, and certainly aren’t as numerous as before. (As John says, the internet is the global virtual showroom.) Interior designers, while incredibly important, have learned to find different ways to work, too, collaborating more with clients and makers. “To the trade” has come to mean something different than it once did, though it’s not quite clear what yet.

What’s really changed, though, is the client. They have a wealth of information available to them, whether it’s research on products, makers, or price. They demand transparency. And the emerging luxury client (the new luxury client, as I like to think of them) demands engagement. They like to collaborate with makers, rather than to point, pay, and, upon coming home one day, find their new table/sofa/humidor waiting and vaguely remember having ordered it many months ago.

Fitting a hygrometer into humidification tray of Diego Humidor

And while the shift has put businesses like John’s through a bit of a roller coaster (since he thrived under the gallery model), it hasn’t been all bad, especially since John seems to revel in the engagement side of things. Thoughtful, garrulous, opinionated, and deeply passionate about what he does, he sure loves a client that does their homework.

“I once had a client who I met at a show, and we got to talking about techniques. He seemed really knowledgeable and I didn’t realize that he wasn’t in the business. After the show, the conversation continued. He asked a lot of questions, and the conversation went back and forth over a span of 3-4 years. And finally, I did a commission with him. By this point I knew the look he liked, how he liked to work, etc. He gave me full artistic license, but we collaborated on the exact look, and that was good because it was a fine line he wanted to straddle: something impressive but not overbearing. And we got there.”

John sees this engagement as being good for both the client and the maker in subtle ways. “There are so many makers out there, and you have so many options, and so many different takes on quality: it’s almost imperative that a client understands the process and quality issues. Knowing more protects a client. At the same time, when a client comes to me after extensive research, I take that as such an honor or high compliment that I want to go out of my way to prove to them that they made the right choice.”

Now, John is creating his own mix of channels, as they say in the business world. He still works with galleries (though he’s choosier these days), but has increasingly been receiving commissions over the internet.

So how did we get here? It’s a refreshing story, given how in love we all seem to be with bold entrepreneurialism and a lack of reference to the past. Because this is a story about innovation and re-creation in the context of heritage and continuity.

Kevin Wiggers

John’s family has been in the woodworking world for generations, carrying on the rich craft traditions of Europe. The modern (20th century) part of the story begins with a man named Jan, who made wooden shoes. (Read John’s site for more rather incredible details. My mind’s already cogitating on the novelistic/HBO/Netflix series possibilities.) After the family’s emigration to Canada in the 1950s, woodworking became, initially, a side note, as Jan’s son Johan went into industry. But he started Wiggers Custom Furniture in 1967 and started building slowly. John, after entertaining thoughts of being a lawyer and then shelving them (smart man), started working with his father in 1981. And now John’s son, Kevin, is a talented designer and also part of the family business.

Hand-finishing an inset walnut finger pull

John’s sense of integrity has guided his part of the Wiggers legacy. Long interested in “green” and sustainability issues (John was at the forefront of environmental stewardship in the woodworking world), he decided to practice what he’d been (gently) preaching. He’d long been using “green” practices in his business, but he decided to take a look at the business itself, and didn’t like what he saw.

“To paraphrase Gandhi, I decided ‘to be the change that I wished to see in the world.’ By now, my shop had grown to roughly 12,000 square feet in size and at times, employed as many as 25 people. Although I was using green and sustainable materials and processes in my shop, I began to ask questions about how much was enough. How busy did I need to be? How much “stuff” was it necessary for me to push into an already glutted market before it was considered enough?

Desk, Bevel Detail

“I thought back to my days as a younger maker, in a smaller studio with fewer helpers and fewer sales and realized that even then I was able to earn my way, albeit with a smaller footprint. But the underlying theme of business is always about growth, and every year when you sit down with the accountant a comparison is made to the previous year in terms of sales and profitability. More = good and less = bad. If you tell people you are busy, the automatic reaction is that busy = good. But to what end? Is one busy for the sake of being busy, or is being busy to be measured in terms of money. If so, how much money and how much is enough?”

[Ah, the crack cocaine that is growth: How often have we heard people talk about that?]

Setting up a new shop in the woods

So in January 2013, he sold his building and downsized his business into a smaller studio on a rural property. Overhead nearer to zero. “The physical transition of making this move turned out much easier than the emotional one. [Not that the physical one was that easy.] After decades of being conditioned to the premise that more growth for a business is better, it was quite a challenge to REALLY embrace the less is more concept. Philosophizing about it is one thing, putting the metaphorical rubber to the road is quite another.

“Plus, there were/are so many family, friends, and colleagues who have thought (and in some cases continue to think) that the cheese has slid off my proverbial cracker for making the decision to do this voluntarily.” (Fabulous phrase, one which I’ll have to remember.)

Today, John picks his clients and seeks out new ones who get his obsession with quality and engagement.

Fitting the tray in the humidor

So what is quality? “Well, environmental sustainability is, of course, part of it, but so are some of the basics that people don’t seem to pay attention to any more. [That's] something that makes me crazy when I see it—and some of the big, well-known, high end brand do this. They really skimp on quality.

“For me, a hallmark of quality is a finished back. So many people use MDF or particle board to save on cost. Clients would be shocked to discover how many high end brands are actually made offshore as little more than rebranded particle board and MDF. I believe in putting the same material on the front as on the back, with no screw heads to be seen. If that much effort is going into a surface that’s going against a wall, it makes sense that the same effort or more will go into everything else. For those seeking true quality, there’s a far greater likelihood of finding it with a small artisanal maker than with some of the more mainstream luxury brands who mostly subcontract out to the lowest bidder.”

Of course, one of the challenges of the internet is that it puts a huge emphasis on design and “eye candy” and makes it hard to really understand the quality of a piece. “Design is an integral element to any piece, but sometimes, it seems that designers will get so focussed on creating a look and figuring out the best margins they can make on a deal that their appreciation for the actual craft gets lost in the process. It’s sometimes all about the design and not the details…but it is the details that can make or break a piece.”

Handfinishing

When asked what defines him, John answered:

“Coffee: I am both a caffeine junkie and a barista hobbyist who enjoys making espressos and cappuccinos at home on the weekends.

“Cigars are an occasional vice for me, and I have a particular fondness for Arturo Fuente Hemingway’s.

“My constantly inquiring mind. (As a student of history and the cycles of human nature I am well aware that the real workings of the world are rarely based on what we would call ‘conventional wisdom.’ This, in turn, has triggered more than a few serendipitous journeys).

“My hands. I’ve learned long ago that the tips of my fingers can see (through the touch of feel) details that are often invisible to the naked eye. All of us have this ability, but few are cognizant of it.

“My core stash of woods. Over the past 30+ years I have accumulated over 100,000 square feet of many species of beautiful and unusual woods, which I refer to as my core stash.”

Details

John Wiggers: http://wiggerscustomfurniture.com
Instagram: http://instagram.com/wiggerscustomfurniture?ref=badge

The post Finding the Sweet Spot: John Wiggers appeared first on handful of salt.

Read more on MAKE

Check out his wood automaton that depicts the splash after a water droplet hits a body of water.

From the video description:

The object of this project was to produce an Automata [sic] that was inspired by the work of Reuben Margolin. All components were hand made the aim was to recreate the reaction of droplet as it impacts a body of water.

The machine was made by Dean O'Callaghan. Here is where you can see more by work by Dean O'Callaghan.

Continuing with my habit of taking a topic and flogging it until I kill whatever little interest there may be, I offer this blog. But first…

I spent a few days in meditation and reflection on my future as a blogger. For you see, I have betrayed your sacred trust and one of the essential core values of bloggers everywhere and provided false and possibly misleading information due to my lack of due diligence and proper research caused, in no small way, by my laziness and sloth. I decided to admit my shortcomings and go on IF you all are willing to forgive.

My transgression came in my last posting where in the caption of a photo, I claimed that this variant of a trifid foot was a “Philadelphia thing”. While true the trifid foot was used in Philadelphia area furniture, this was not a Philadelphia piece. I had a conversation with a friend of Glen Huey’s at Popular Woodworking and he said it looked more Irish or English than Philadelphian. Following up with his belief, I went back to the antiques dealer and saw that it was an “English 19th century George II style walnut side chair, drake foot at the front and pad at the rear”. I was chagrinned.

So you have no need to read Chuck Bender’s article in Popular Woodworking’s August 2012 issue on carving three different trifid feet.

Unless you like the trifid feet in the following pictures.

It all started in September, 2012 when I traveled north to take a class from a Philadelphia area furniture maker. (I understand the the instructor and school have since moved on.) Some friends had recommended the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, DE. My friends said it had an impressive collection of furniture. I arrived to discover that they had just completed the renovation of the second floor gallery. The furniture was about to be reinstalled and if I came back next Saturday, I could see it.

What was on display was a small collection Delaware area furniture in the Founder’s Hall. It was a very nice collection of furniture that was claimed to be among the oldest in their collection. There were three or four pieces with trifid feet. Among them are:

A small server.

An impressive chest on stand.

Below, notice the courage of the furniture maker to build a drawer front using a board with a knot. Look at the damage on the top right drawer. Anyone have an idea as to the cause of the damage? A group of us just toured the MESDA (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts) collection in Old Salem and saw several drawers with similar damage, usually on the left side of the drawer.

Note the knot and upper right drawer damage.

And a desk.

Click HERE to see the rest of the furniture in Founder’s Hall at the Biggs Museum in Dover, DE.

Dover also is home to the Johnson Victrola Museum. I’ve known about it for years but never made the effort to go there. It is another museum that turns out to be more more interesting than I thought. Named for the inventor E.R Johnson, founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company, a pioneering company in the production of phonographs and phonograph recordings. Well worth the trip.

Readers — On Tuesday a New Jersey state appeals court ruled that a mom who let her 19-month-old wait in the car for 5 to 10 minutes was guilty of abuse. According to this story by Salvador Rizzo in the Star-Ledger:

“A parent invites substantial peril when leaving a child of such tender years alone in a motor vehicle that is out of the parent’s sight, no matter how briefly,” Judge Clarkson Fisher Jr. wrote for the three-judge panel.

He cited the risk of “car theft or kidnapping” and the possibility that “on a hot day, the temperature inside a motor vehicle can quickly spike to dangerously high levels, just as it may rapidly and precipitously dip on a cold night.”

As far as I can tell, the judge did not give any statistics. How could he? Had he or his fellow judges bothered to look at the facts (or remember their own childhoods, when most of us waited in cars), they would have realized the mom had made a completely rational, safe decision based on reality, not delusion.

Let’s consider some facts. Every year, more than 1200 children under age 15 are killed in car accidents. Meantime, about 50 are kidnapped and murdered by strangers (generally not after being snatched from vehicles), and about 35-40 die of overheating in cars, the vast majority after having been forgotten there all day, NOT after waiting out a 10-minute errand.

So as David DeLugas, executive director of the National Association of Parents points out: a child is actually far more safe in car that is NOT MOVING than one that IS.

Of course it would make no sense to arrest any parent who drives a kid anywhere. In fact, it would be nuts! Sure there’s a risk whenever we drive our kids, but it’s small enough that it’s one we rationally take.

So shouldn’t we be allowed to take the even TINIER risk of letting them wait in the car during an errand?

Ernest Landante, a spokesman for the Department of Children and Families, welcomed the court’s ruling …“Leaving a child alone in a vehicle – even for just a minute – is a bad idea,” Landante said. “Left unattended, a child in a vehicle is vulnerable to abduction and dehydration.”

Dehydration? Over the course of one minute? Can we please base our laws on something remotely resembling earth-bound reality?

The ruling, which can be applied to similar cases from now on, does not specify the age at which it no longer becomes negligent to leave a child in a car. Anyone under 18 is protected by the state child abuse law, but Fisher’s ruling also speaks of the “tender” age of [the defendant] Eleanor’s child.

So, considering the court has ruled that basically anyone under 18 is in danger even for a single MINUTE in a parked car, are we ready to do something about it, and bring attention to the cruelty of treating normal, loving parents like child abusing monsters? If so, would anyone consider joining me for a morning in New Jersey when we’d let our kids wait in the car for 10 minutes? Let me know! – L.

Never? Never ever ever? Even if I rationally, lovingly decide it’s safe?

As many of you already know, I write out of order. It is, perhaps, the most irritating part of my own writing process—at least to me. Fortunately, this new world of publishing really works for someone like me. Everything I write is not set in stone. I can move the pieces around when I’m done.

Why am I starting like this? The clue is in the subtitle. This really isn’t Part 5 of the Discoverability series, even though it should be. When I put this into a little book—and I’ll do that when I’m finished—this will be part one.

You see the marks on my forehead? That’s the visible sign of head-desk syndrome.

Because what I’m writing about this week is something I already knew—I’ve said it over and over in the contract pieces—but I never ever put it together with all of writing, and I never thought of the implications before. Especially what those implications mean to discoverability.

We all know that our industry—publishing—is going through a massive disruption caused by new technology. The disruption is in two areas—the production system and the distribution system.

It’s easy and cheap to produce a book these days. Understand that I’m not talking about writing one. I’m talking about the things that happen after the book is finished. Please be clear on that, because if you misunderstand that point, you’ll miss the point of the entire blog.

In the past, it took tens of thousands of dollars to produce an actual physical book. Then you’d end up with a warehouse (or a garage) full of books, and no way to get them to a customer.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a lot of writers self-published and ponied up that large amount of money. But by the middle of the century, writers couldn’t get the books to market, even if the writers produced the books.

Traditional publishers created a lock on the distribution system that was pretty extreme. Books went from the publisher’s warehouse to hundreds of distributors all over the country, who sent the books to bookstores, grocery stores, truck stops, and drugstores. Any place that wanted books could get them.

That system was already breaking down when Amazon started up in the mid-1990s. The main part of the distribution system had collapsed by the end of the century, murdered by large stores that wanted centralized ordering. The day of the local distributor who knew what his customers wanted disappeared.

Books got delivered to bookstores and a few non-bookstore chains, like grocery stores. But the small non-bookstores that used to get a spinner rack of books? Those stores couldn’t order books if they tried. The markets contracted.

Traditional publishers responded to this contraction by getting rid of the bulk of their sales reps, leaving a small sales force that mostly sold to a handful of buyers. Traditional publishers changed editorial strategy to meet the new reality, trying to find books that would appeal to a mass audience, just as the mass audience in all other parts of entertainment was breaking into pieces.

If traditional publishers want to know why Amazon was successful, it was because Amazon distributed books to the people who wanted them. Amazon didn’t try to dictate who should get what book. (Nor did it chastise its customers for shopping elsewhere, something a lot of independent bookstores still do.) The shopping experience on Amazon wasn’t pleasant at first; it isn’t always pleasant now. But it is useful, and easy.

Thanks to Amazon and other online retailers, books went from the publisher to the online site to the customer. Note that this procedure cut out at least one middleman.

Combine all of that with the ease of production, and suddenly, midlist writers and wannabe writers didn’t have to go to traditional publishers to get books to readers. Even without the rise of e-books, even if the only change in the system had been the low-cost self-published paper book, writers still would be going direct in much larger numbers than ever before.

The one thing traditional publishers did not change in response to this two-pronged attack on the old system was the marketing strategy. Marketing really is all about discoverability, getting the customer to find something that is new to them, not necessarily newly produced.

As the outlets for books shrank, traditional publishers did nothing to compensate. Nothing.

Here’s what a physical book rack is. It’s advertising. Even if a shopper does not buy a book off that rack, she sees the books, notes them, and maybe decides to buy them from her favorite store or get the book from the library. People discover books by browsing. I don’t care how good Amazon’s analytics are, they simply do not compare to that moment of discovery—that moment when a weird-looking book catches your eye, you pick it up, and realize that it’s heavier than expected and the deckle edge makes the book prettier than you originally thought.

Holding a book is a sensual experience, one that book lovers adore. You might decide to buy the e-book instead, but  you might never have seen that book if you hadn’t been standing in that store at the moment the book was on the shelf, and you happened to see an intriguing cover (or title or something).

Traditional publishers panicked about the changes in distribution, but did nothing to combat it. They didn’t increase their sales force, and try to take the books themselves to independent bookstores. They didn’t woo regional grocery chains (as opposed to national ones). They didn’t talk to museums or truck stops or department stores, any other place that used to take books.

Traditional publishers gave up without a fight.

Worse, they maintained their marketing strategy, as if the old 20^th century system was still in place.

Go back and read my two posts on the old ways. Please understand that those old ways were built for a completely different world. And they were built for a different type of business.

The different type of business is where the paradigm shift comes in.  Let’s go back to the very basics, here, which I have said a million times in my contract posts. Writers do not sell books.

Repeat after me: Writers do not sell books.

Writers license copyright.

I always follow that statement with this one: if you don’t understand what I mean, then buy the Copyright Handbook and read it. I tell writers that all the time, and I can always tell by their questions and their actions whether or not they have read and understood the book. Too many simply have not a clue what copyright even is.

Let me tell you.

Copyright is property.

And an even nicer thing about copyright is that it’s intellectual property. Unlike a physical object which can be sold and you’ll never see it again, intellectual property exists in many forms. My husband, Dean Wesley Smith, believes those forms may be infinite. He limits them to a writer’s imagination. He likens it to a bakery—a magic bakery—which sells only pies.

I’ll let Dean explain:

Think of us (every writer) as a huge bakery and all we make are pies. Magic pies, that seem to just reform after we sell off (license) pieces of the pie to customers.

And each pie can be divided into thousands of pieces if we want.

The Magic Pie secret ingredient is called “Copyright.”

Every story we write, every novel we write, is a magic pie full of copyright.

We can sell (license) parts of it to one publisher, other parts to another publisher, some parts to overseas markets, other parts to audio, or eBooks, or game companies, or Hollywood, or web publishers, and on and on and on. One professional writer I knew licensed over 100 different gaming rights to different places on one novel. He had a very sharp knife cutting that small section of his magic pie.

You really need to read the article in which he discusses the magic bakery. It has a different focus than I have here. But I’m going to add just one more thing from Dean’s post:

You create the inventory, the pie, just once, but can license it for your entire life, having pieces you licensed keep coming back to the pie over and over, and your estate can keep taking and licensing parts of that pie for seventy years past your death. Nifty, huh?

Are you all starting to see why Kris and I are harping all the time about bad traditional publishing contracts? If you give too many rights to work away for too long, it never returns to your bakery to make you money. (Maybe in 35 years…again, study copyright.)

Magic pies are a great thing. They’d be even better if they had magic calories that stuck to you if you needed them, and dropped off if you didn’t. But that would be another story.

Here’s a different way to think about your book, copyright, and intellectual property. Think of it as property.

Let me be more specific. Think of it as a house that you built. You already have a home, so you’re not building the house for personal shelter.

You put time and effort into that newly built house, not counting the costs of construction (which, in the case of writing, would be the care and feeding of the writer, the overhead [which is the computer time and the electricity], and on and on). So you have an investment in that house right from the very beginning.

When the house is finished, you could sell it. You would probably make quite a bit of money up front if, of course, you built the house right and you had the ingredients that people wanted, in a neighborhood they wanted. If you were good at house-building, you’d recoup your investment in that house, plus a percentage.

That percentage is your profit. It might be a few thousand. It might be tens of thousands. It might be hundreds of thousands. But that’s all you will ever get from the house, because the house is no longer yours.

Pretty simple, huh?

Now, if you rent the house, you won’t recoup your investment right away. It’ll take time to make the initial investment back and even longer to make a profit. Once you pass that profit threshold however, the earning continues.  Yes, you might have to do some maintenance here and there, and you’ll have to pay attention to the overall marketplace, particularly when it looks like the current tenant is about to leave. But the house will continue to earn for you as long as you own it and as long as you keep it on the rental market.

The analogy breaks down a bit here, because copyright is not like a house, at some point, the copyright on that property will fall into the public domain (unless you’re really smart and know how to manipulate copyright legally to maintain copyright on some bits of the property—and no, I’m not going into that here). But stick with real estate for a moment.

You guys are familiar with the property argument for contract purposes because you’ve been reading my blog. But we’re talking about discoverability here, not contracts.

What’s the difference?

Marketing.

When you put that house up for sale, you have one chance to recoup your investment. Just one. So you get the word out everywhere. You want velocity. You want that house to sell as fast as possible, so you can make your money back as fast as possible.

Then, if you rehab or build a lot of houses, you’ll pour that money into another project and do it all over again. Build, sell, profit. Build, sell, profit.

By the end of the year (if this isn’t a year like 2008-2010), you’ll make a tidy sum of money. Not enough to retire on, but enough to get you through the next year and the next.

The problem is  you’re working your butt off. You’re working on the sell/velocity model. The faster you build, the faster you sell. The faster you sell, the faster you make a profit.

All of your marketing efforts focus on that first moment when your property goes up for sale.

But…

What happens if, two years after you sold that property, the neighborhood it is in gets gentrified? That neighborhood becomes the cool neighborhood, the one everyone who is anyone wants to live in, and they’ll pay ridiculous prices to buy a house there.

Will you get a piece of that ridiculous price?

Hell, no. You sold the house two years ago. All of it. Every last bit of it. You’ll never see another dime from that house. You’re done.

What if you kept the house and rent it? Well, let me tell you as a former rental agent, that when a neighborhood becomes gentrified, the rents go up along with the housing prices. The cool people who can’t buy (or can’t afford to buy) will rent, and at inflated prices.

If you still own the house and rent it out, you’ll be making more money per month than you made when the house was finished years before.

You might invest some money into marketing when the neighborhood becomes hot. One of the property owners I used to work for advertised his upscale rentals even when they weren’t available. He was creating buzz, he was making them desirable, and when those rentals became available, they stayed available for hours, not days, not weeks, not months.

The man was a savvy marketer. He always advertised his upscale housing. But he never advertised his student housing. Ever. He didn’t need to. That’s what I managed. The student properties. And they rented in about two weeks in March—for the beginning of the Fall Semester. By the end of the first week in March, all the good student housing was gone. Only the mediocre-to-crappy stuff remained. And that was gone by the second week of March.

So how did new students get rental housing? They didn’t. They had to live in university housing—dorms or graduate apartments. New students didn’t find out about off-campus housing until they’d lived in town for a while.

Discoverability.

Because there was a built-in (continually refreshing) market for student housing, and because there wasn’t enough off-campus housing for everyone who wanted it, the student housing needed no boost from advertising dollars. In fact, that ad money would have been poorly spent.

But, the upscale housing needed the constant boost, because—to be honest with you—the neighborhood wasn’t yet the best in the city. It aspired to be the best, but hadn’t achieved it yet. Without the word-of-mouth, and the occasional buzz, those properties would not have remained full.

Was my old boss able to rent all of his former properties? Hell, no. He had rentals that needed work and rentals in undesirable neighborhoods, that turned over every few months, instead every year. The complexes had a lot of vacancies. He also had new properties that had just been completed that no one had heard of yet, and were less than 20% full.

Was he panicked? Nope. That vacancy rate was built into the earnings projections. His marketing campaigns hadn’t even started for the new properties, and it wasn’t worth marketing the old ones until they got spruced up.

I do want you to note something: The new properties didn’t fill immediately, and my old boss didn’t panic. Because he wasn’t working on the velocity model. He wasn’t trying to sell something to recoup his money fast. He was handling earnings over time.

He was treating the properties as investments.

“Investments” as defined in the financial field (not in economics) are all about putting money into an asset with the hope of good return (in the form of appreciation, dividends, interest earnings, etc.). All investments involve risk. The key to investing is to manage the risk in relation to the reward.

Before you make an investment, you need to calculate what sort of return you want from it.

Again, let’s go back to our house. If you need a quick return, you might sell the property.  However, you might want to hold onto the property and make a small annual return in the hopes that the property will appreciate.

Before you do anything with the property, you decide what you want from it.

Now, let’s return to writing. Most writers want to be published. Then they get published and they realize they want their books to make money. Most writers hope to make millions, usually within the first year. Hardly anyone ever does that. Over time, perhaps, but never up front.

Writers rarely (read: almost never) think about their time as an investment, and the writing they produce as an asset. These are tough concepts, because publishing changed twice in my lifetime, and the old thinking got engrained.

From about 1920 to about 1960, traditional publishers were smaller companies, generally owned by their founders. I’m currently (yes, still) reading Hothouse, the history of Farrar Straus Giroux, and FSG’s main owner from its founding in the 1930s to the early 1990s was Roger Straus.

Straus tried to buy as many rights as possible from his writers, particularly in the early days, so that he could then apply the magic-bakery thinking to these assets he purchased from the know-nothing writers. Straus kept the properties he bought in print, and he capitalized on waves that came through. That’s why FSG made money when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in 1978. The company did not have to find Singer’s backlist and reprint it. They had had it in print for years. They did have to do additional printings, but that’s different, and less costly.

In other words, back in the old days, traditional publishers treated books as assets, not just in accounting, but in practice as well. If there was a bandwagon to jump on six  years after a book was published, the traditional publisher had the in-house memory to know the book belonged on that bandwagon. Since the book was in print, the publisher could jump fairly nimbly onto that bandwagon with just a change of marketing.

The first wave of corporate mergers in publishing started around 1960, and got worse in the ensuing forty years. Traditional publishing kept books as assets in accounting, but no longer treated them like assets  in practice. Instead, traditional publishing treated books like widgets and counted those widgets as inventory. Stock. Stuff that would grow stale and have no value—which was why writers could win awards a year after the book came out, and no reader could find the book, because the publisher had determined that the award-winning widget was already past its sell-by date, and didn’t need to be reprinted.

Instead of making money off the bandwagon, traditional publishing let most parades march on by.

This thinking became so pervasive—forty-plus years of pervasive—that when Dean and I taught beginning writers, we told them that when they took their books to market, they had to think of the books as widgets.

We also told the writers to negotiate their contracts and keep as many rights as possible, treating the books as assets that needed to be protected.

Yes, we were as crazy as the rest of publishing, and only recently have I realized just how deep the crazy went.

This series has helped with that.

Because if you are marketing a widget that will spoil within a few months, then your marketing plan is based on getting the most out of that widget in the shortest amount of time. Not only that, but you’ll need a different widget in the second month, and yet another widget in month three.

But, if you are accumulating assets, then you need to manage the asset. You might not choose to market the asset at all until you figure out exactly what you want from the asset.

The fascinating thing about assets, folks, is that their value isn’t constant. The values are in flux. Sometimes an asset isn’t worth what you paid for it, and sometimes the asset’s value is outrageously inflated.

Mostly, though, people who manage assets manage a lot of them. How many investors do you know who only own one share of stock? I know no one who manages rental properties for a living who only  has one property. I know a lot of people with day jobs who also own one rental. Just like I know a lot of writers with one novel who also have day jobs.

So…

The paradigm shift is pretty simple to say and difficult to comprehend.

Every item that you write is an asset. More than that, each asset can be divided à la the magic bakery into dozens, maybe hundreds, more assets. Then you need to decide how you want to market each asset.

Each asset needs its own investment calculation done so that you can figure out what to expect from that asset and how best to handle the asset.

Not every asset needs a marketing plan—at least not in 2014. Not every asset needs careful tending. Most assets don’t do well in the velocity method, although a handful do.

Because our assets exist in the entertainment field, we want customers to interact with the asset—whatever that means (play a game from it, see a movie based on it, read the short story that started it all). We want those customers to find each asset. We also want to make a small profit off of each asset, so that we can live off our investments.

When you start thinking of your writing as an asset which will, if you do things right, appreciate in value over time, then you realize that applying marketing methods based on widgets that will spoil does your asset no good at all.

Your thinking has to change before we start talking about ways to market your asset. Or not market your asset. Or market some of your assets and leave the rest alone.

Think of my former boss, the man who marketed the assets that needed constant championing, maintained the assets that were doing well without an marketing at all, and didn’t market the assets that still sprucing up. Each time he advertised something, he had a reason for doing so. That reason had to do with managing assets, not with becoming famous or making a financial killing using suspect methods because “that’s how it’s always been done.”

As you move into 2014, practice thinking of your output—all of your output—as individual assets. If the magic bakery doesn’t work for you Star Trek fans, then think of your work as tribbles hiding in a pile of grain. Each story can have a thousand lives, if you let it. Each life is an asset. And each asset might require marketing so that it can be discovered. Or it might simply need to be left alone to grow on its own.

It’s a difficult shift to make, growing up as we all did in Widget World. But it’s a shift we need to make.

It’s time.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to carry two contradictory thoughts in my brain at the same time. I’ve always treated my copyrights as assets, but I used to market (and write) my fiction as if the stories were all widgets. I know now that I operate in a writing world without widgets.

Unfortunately, the one constant remains the amount of time it takes me to write new material. And these blogs take time away from my fiction writing, which is the most lucrative part of my investment portfolio.

That’s why I put a donation button on my nonfiction, but not on my fiction. I need a little added incentive to keep writing the blog, an incentive I don’t need for the fiction.

Thank you all for coming here every Thursday, and thanks for the support you give me by linking to others, discussing ideas in the comments, e-mailing me, and yes, donating. I appreciate all of it more than I can say.

Click Here to Go To PayPal.

“The Business Rusch: A Paradigm Shift (Discoverability Kinda)” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

SPECIAL NOTICE: I’d like to put out a call to those of you who are traditionally published. I need to update my Deal Breakers book for 2014. I have quite a bit of material, but I would like to see what I’ve missed.

So if you received a traditional publishing contract from a major publishing house and/or an agency agreement from an agent, please black out all the personal information and send it to me. I’m particularly interested in the contract clauses you negotiated away and/or that you walked away from.

I also would like to see the clauses you’re proud of getting. The ones where you feel you triumphed in your negotiation.

I need the entire contract, because a contract is a living document, and what it says on page 13 has an impact on what it says on page 2. Please black out your name, the name of your agent, the advances, etc., and send me the file.

I promise, I will not use your name or any personal information, except that I might say something like “a first-time author” or “an author who has published novels for fifteen years” or “a bestselling author.” I won’t even use a personal pronoun to give your secret away. And I’ll be the only one who looks at this.

If you want to see how I do this, look at the Addendums post from earlier this year. (And yes, that will be in Deal Breakers 2014.)

Thank you! I appreciate all of the help.

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Recently the folks at Cards Against Humanity ran a promotion. For $12 you got 12 mystery gifts over the course of 12 days.

100,000 people bought into it.

What did they do with the money? $100,000 of it went to donorschoose.org, an educational charity for school supplies, etc…

They backed 299 projects on the site, mostly to impoverished schools. You can see the details of everything on their site. It’s a great read, yet some parts are a bit depressing.

Frankly, I was blown away by this.

by David Kudler (@StillpointDigPr)

David, who is currently serving as vice president of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) is also the proprietor of a digital publishing company. His last article here was 7 Deadly Myths and 3 Inspired Truths About Book Editing. Today David has an idea for you that can really help you engage readers and sell more books. Here’s his post.

Quick: who—aside from you, your immediate family, and your dog—are the people most excited about your book, most ready to talk about it with their friends, and best equipped to talk about your book’s virtues? Anyone?

Well, there are lots of possible answers for each of those questions, but when it comes to identifying the whole bunch, I’d bet it’s a group that you haven’t thought much about: The people who have just finished the last page. 

Think about it. If someone has actually finished your book, they’re committed to it. They’re interested in what you have had to say, and it’s fresh in their minds. They are your ideal advocates, your perfect evangelists for generating more excitement about your work and making sure that people hear about it. So what are you doing to harness that potential?

Most self-publishers don’t do much of anything. Maybe they put a bio at the back, and, possibly a link to their web page. Commercial publishers don’t do a whole lot more—they’ll put a list of similar titles the reader might be interested in, and, if they’re very twenty-first century, they’ll hyperlink those titles to the appropriate pages on their site.

Those are all really, really good ideas, and a great way to make the next sale. Is that enough? No, no, no.

What are you going to do to make sure that this title finds its audience? How are you going to harness that band of potential sales reps who’ve just finished your book and really want to talk with someone about it? I was thinking about this recently, and realized that the answer was pretty simple, when you remember that an ebook is simply a specialized web page. You do something like this:

To anyone who uses the web regularly—especially anyone who buys ebooks—those buttons are self-explanatory. Click us! they say. Click us and let everyone know what you think of this fascinating book you’ve just read! 

You’ve seen a million little constellations of buttons like that on your browser. Why not put one where those motivated readers can use them at exactly the point where they’re most likely to do so?

To decode (if you haven’t been submerged in the culture of social media), each of those buttons leads to a review site. From top left to bottom right, they are buttons from the bookseller—in this case Amazon.com (you should change this to match each site you sell on), GoodReads.com (the preeminent review exchange site), my own website (more on that later), Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and Pinterest.com. (The missing link here—heh, “missing link”—is for Google+. I’ll explain below why I haven’t included that button.)

Finding the buttons is easy—the sites themselves usually have link buttons that they want you to use, and you’re welcome to use the buttons from this post. Building the appropriate links is just a bit harder, but only a bit. In order to create the appropriate links for these buttons above, you must first do the following things, all of which you have to do anyway:

1. Create a dedicated web page for your book — on your own site, or on any other site that you like (if you are working through a publishing services company, they’ll create one for you).
2. Create a cover for your book.
3. Create a GoodReads page for your book (or, if your book has been published before, for this edition of your book).

Now to the business of building those links. 

Your page: The first one that you need to think about is the one to your site—or whatever you are using as your dedicated page, since a number of the other links will be based on that. If you haven’t already loaded a copy of your logo/colophon into the ebook, do that, and then hyperlink it as follows:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/?detail&amp;buy“><img src=”images/logo.jpg” alt=”Logo” /></a>

Now, obviously, the actual addresses will need to correspond to your page and the location of your image in your book’s structure. Okay so far? If you’ve been working on your ebook or know HTML at all, that should have been a piece of cake.

Okay. Load the rest of those images into your ebook. 

GoodReads: Now, the easiest of the remaining links will be the one to your GoodReads page. The link will look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123456789-yourbook“><img src=”images/goodreads-button.jpg” alt=”Logo” /></a>

Amazon: Since the large majority of ebook sales—especially by self-published authors—happen through Amazon’s Kindle store, I’m going to show you how to link to that. However, you should absolutely change this button and the link code to match that of whatever site you’re selling on, since they don’t like you linking to other booksellers from within their ebooks!

All of the booksellers use the ISBN as a unique identifier for each individual edition—except for Amazon. Amazon uses their own identifier for ebooks—ASIN—which means, unfortunately, that we have to wait until after the book is published on the Kindle Store to create this link. 

In either case, we’re going to use that number to create a link to the seller’s review page for your book. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to hit the button that says “Post your own review” or whatever. Because Amazon doesn’t assign an ASIN until the title is published, the easiest way to get this link is to go to your book’s page. Look up in the address bar; it will look something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Title-ebook/dp/B00ABCDEFG/

The two parts we care about are the title tag (Your-Title-ebook) and the ASIN (B00ABCDEFG). Now, you can’t link directly to the script launched by the “Be the first to review this book” link. However, you can link to the list of reviews. No reviews yet, you say? Pshaw. Here’s a typical Amazon review listing:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-in-a-Fair-Place-ebook/product-reviews/B00AXN84H0/

You’ll note that I’ve highlighted the title tag and ASIN. Replace those with your own so that it looks something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Title-ebook/product-reviews/B00ABCDEFG/

Now create that link in your ebooks:

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Your-Title-ebook/product-reviews/B00ABCDEFG/”><img src=”images/amazon-button.jpg” alt=”Logo” /></a>

There you go! When someone clicks on that, the first thing they’ll see is a button reading “Create your own review.” Just what we want.

Now it gets interesting—but if your dedicated web page already has social sharing set up, even this isn’t a big deal. If there are buttons already set up for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., just click on them, copy the URL out of the address bar, create the link, and you’re done.

If you don’t have sharing set up (and if you don’t, you should), it’s still doable. You just need to know one thing about how web addresses are called from inside other URLs: you can’t use any non-alphanumeric characters. So to include a colon (:), slash (/), ampersand (&), question mark (?), etc., we have to use (gulp) the HTML numeric code for that character.

Well, no big deal. I’ll give you a cheat sheet. So let’s start with your book’s dedicated web page. It probably looks something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/?detail&buy

To use this inside of one of the social networking site’s URL’s, we’re going to need to change all of those non-letter characters to HTML codes. Here’s that cheat sheet I was talking about.

• Change the colon (:) to %3A
• Change all slashes (/) to %2F
• Change all question marks (?) to %3F
• Change all ampersands (&) to %26
• Change all spaces ( ) to %20

When you make those substitutions, your URL will look like this:

http%3A%2F% 2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fyourbookpage%2F%3Fdetail&amp;buy

Ugly, but browsers will read them just fine. To create those social links just replace the bit that matches our dummy address above with your own. 

Facebook: For this link, we’re going to replace the web page URL, which goes after the “u=” attribute, and we’re also going to pre-enter some text (the author’s name and the book’s title, in this example) after the “t=” attribute. For that text, instead of using %20 for spaces, use the plus symbol (+).

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fyourbookpage%2F%3Fdetail&26;buy&amp;t=Your+Name+-+Your+Title&amp;display=popup

Twitter: This link is easy; just paste our doctored URL after the “url=” attribute:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fyourbookpage%2F%3Fdetail&26;buy

Pinterest: For this link, we’re going to use your web page’s actual, undoctored URL, and we’re again going to pre-enter some text—your name, the book’s title, and more text (the short description, for example) after the “description=” attribute.

This time, we’re using %20 for spaces. We are also going to need a web address for your cover art (here called “cover.jpg”) which goes after the “media=” attribute.

http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/?detail&buy&amp;media=http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/images/cover.jpg&amp;description=The%20best%20book%20ever%20written%20blah%20blah

There you go! Now you’ve given your erstwhile evangelists the wherewithal to share their passion for your work with their friends, their colleagues, the world! Will every reader take advantage of that opportunity? No. But if even one in ten does, and even one in a hundred of that person’s friends buys your book, that’s a win. You’re harnessing the power of social networking.

By the way: why no Google+? The short answer is that Google really doesn’t like having content “pushed” into their network. And so, while they love having those “+1″ buttons all over the place, I haven’t yet figured out how to create a way of turning that into a script that an ebook reader can interpret. If you’re smarter than I am (which is not unlikely) and can suggest a way to create such a link, please let us know!

David Kudler is a writer and editor living just north of the Golden Gate Bridge with his wife and daughters. And cat. And many guppies. He serves as publisher for Stillpoint Digital Press, producing ebooks, audiobooks, and print editions. Since 1999, he has overseen the publications program of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, managing the publication of over fifty print, ebook, audio, and video titles, including the third edition of the seminal Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Photo: bigstockphoto.com

When I see a project or designer that interests me, I go bug them for an interview. A few months ago I asked Jamey to participate in an interview and he agreed. A few weeks ago I sent him the questions, but Jamey changed things up a bit and also asked ME questions. A discussion ensued about Viticulture, Euphoria, our processes, reading habits, design, and more. It’s one of my favorite things that’s ever been on the site. 

As the discussion grew quite long, we decided to split it into 3 parts. Come back tomorrow and Friday to read the second and third parts. 

Jamey’s company just launched a Kickstarter for their new game that has funded in under an hour. Check it out here and ask any questions in the comments. You can also read my original interview with Jamey here.

A discussion between Jamey Stegmaier and Grant Rodiek (bold)

HG: Hi Jamey! Can you please refresh us…who are you? What do we need to know about you?

Jamey: Hi Grant! Thanks for having me. The three most important things you need to know about me are:

(1) I am the president, lead designer, logisitics coordinator, playtest organizer, and head of customer relations and marketing for Stonemaier Games, a company I co-founded last year with a friend, Alan Stone, to publish our game, Viticulture.

(2) I write a series of Kickstarter lessons for fellow project creators to use. You can find it over on www.stonemaiergames.com.

(3) I have two cats, Biddy and Walter, one of whom loves to sit in game boxes, and the other of whom is an excellent Tzolk’in player. I have to restrain myself from posting photos of them every day on my personal blog, www.jameystegmaier.com. How about you–what are three things about yourself that you haven’t already shared on your blog?

The tables have turned! Three things I haven’t shared…

1.) It’s my goal to one-day found and manage a board game publishing company. Until that day I lie in the shadows, observing and learning everything I can.

2.) I’m definitely the self-loathing creative type. I’m constantly questioning what I make in the hopes of making it fantastic. It can be very hard sometimes and something I need to work on.

3.) I own a corgi, Peaches, and I love her dearly. I have to restrain myself from posting more pictures than I already do via Twitter and FB. She is endlessly entertaining — a great companion.

Jamey: Thanks for sharing. #2 is particularly interesting to me. I view that as a good thing…unless it really gets you down when something isn’t perfect. That’s where Peaches comes in.

It never gets me down. It’s who I am. I have friends who accuse me of pushing things too far but I don’t think I’ve done that yet.

Let’s talk quickly about Viticulture. Your first game raised $65,000 on Kickstarter and it’ll be sent to backers shortly. What was the single most important thing you learned from Viticulture?

Jamey: Great question. It’s tough to boil down to one thing, as I’ve learned a lot by managing this process. Single most important thing: Okay, I’ve always heard that if you do what you love, it doesn’t feel like work. I have a day job, a very good day job with great employees. I’m very grateful for it. And every day I go home and spent another 4-6 hours working on Stonemaier Games. Added to the time I spend on weekends on the company, it’s easily a second full-time job. But it doesn’t feel like a job at all. Even though I haven’t made a dime off of Viticulture (every cent and then some went into making the game as awesome as possible), I love every second that I spend working on it and our other games and with interacting with all of the people who became connected to use through Kickstarter. Do you feel that way when you’re working on your games?

I often joke that game design is my second job that pays horribly. I used to play video games and do other things in the evenings and weekends. Now, my spare time is spent designing, doing graphic design, writing, and generally trying to take this whole board game thing as seriously as possible.

I love the process. I love writing and reading rules, figuring out the board layout. One of the main reasons I want to become a publisher is I love the development just as much as the initial design, often more so. Like you said, it’s not quite work if you love it.

Jamey: I’m glad this topic came up, because I think some people may see the financial success of our projects and think that we might be able to afford to make game design/publishing a full-time gig. What I’m starting to realize is that the only way that could happen is if a game really takes off post-Kickstarter. The sunk cost of making a great game is rather large–all that art and design, and often moulds and schematics on the printer side. The first copy of a game can cost upwards of $15,000 due to professional art and design. Once you make a second copy, the cost for each of them drops to $7,500. And so on. So if a game enters a second print run, the art and design cost per unit is negligible by that point, and all you’re paying for is the manufacturing cost and shipping. I’m preaching to the choir, Grant–you know all this–but I bring it up so that other game creators on Kickstarter don’t quit their day jobs.

I still haven’t broken even on Farmageddon! For better or worse, my royalty hasn’t quite covered the money I spent on 80% of the art, pitching to publishers, and marketing the game. Long term my goal is to start small with a self-financed game, learn the ropes, then go through traditional funding methods to try to take a stab at things “for real.”

Your money-back guarantee garnered a great deal of attention. When so many publishers take the stance of “buyer beware,” you took a different approach. Why did you do this?

Jamey: “Buyer beware” is a cop-out to me. When I buy a gallon of milk from the grocery store, is it my job to research the milk company and the hormone levels of the cows and run the milk through lab tests to make sure it’s good for me? Not at all. Kickstarter is no different. In my opinion, it’s the job of the project creator to clearly explain what the project is and how it’s going every step of the way. It’s their job to price their rewards fairly and deliver amazing value for the people who made their dream come true. It is addition to all of those things that I decided to offer backers a money-back guarantee on Viticulture (and we’ll do the same for our next game, Euphoria). That puts the impetus on me to make a great product. And sure, some people simply are not going to like the game. Some of them might return it. And that’s okay. They gave me the initial capital to create the game in the first place, something I could not have done on my own. Their responsibility ends there. The rest is on me.

That said, I completely respect project creators who aren’t comfortable with that approach–just because they don’t have that level of confidence in their product doesn’t mean that they won’t deliver in the end. What do you think?

I agree with you. It’s what I would want as a customer. One of my biggest fears in self-publishing is that what I’m creating isn’t good enough. It’s not up to the level of the competition, which I consider to be both the established publishers (Z-Man, Fantasy Flight) and new ones you see on Kickstarter. When I sat back and thought “would I give a money-back guarantee on this?” for my own games, my answer wasn’t always “yes.” I think it’s the best way to treat your customers and a great motivator to create amazing games.

Jamey: I like that you asked yourself that. I think that’s a great question for self-publishers to ask themselves, even if they don’t actually do a money-back guarantee. “Would I give a money-back guarantee on this game?” If the answer isn’t yes, figure out why.

What can we expect from Viticulture this year? Anything special? Anything of note?

Jamey: I’m currently wondering the same thing! A lot of it depends on how the game is received by the backers and the general public. If it does well and people want to expand the world of Viticulture, the idea we’ve discussed is to concurrently design 4 expansions that can be played in any combination with the original game and include them in a single box. Have you ever thought about doing a Farmageddon expansion? Why or why not?

Farmageddon raised $25,000 on Kickstarter, which was the level for our main stretch goal — a full expansion. The expansion is called Livestocked and Loaded and introduces animals, weather, and new Action cards. It’s 99% finished and is awaiting art production, followed by the long, slow manufacturing process. It’ll be shipped free to all backers, then sold in stores.

I’ll keep designing Farmageddon games as long as Phil (the publisher who manages 5th Street Games) wants them.

Jamey: That’s awesome! How has feedback from Farmageddon fans impacted the expansion, if at all?

It’s difficult with a game like Farmageddon. Much of the negative feedback comes from people who don’t like take-thats, don’t like luck, don’t like games this light and silly. I tried to take a step back and think about things that were missing after years of playing it. Put another way — what are obvious holes I can fill?

My answer was that the game could use some more long-term aspects. This is where animals come in. Whereas crops are very fragile and temporary, the animals can’t be destroyed. Winning an animal is a game-spanning activity that requires a little more strategy.

I also thought the game could use a few more unexpected elements, but not the destructive kind. When you’ve played a simple game like Farmageddon dozens of times, it can (arguably) use a little more pizzazz. This is where weather comes in. Every game, you’ll get 5 randomly selected weather cards (out of 10) that will emerge at different times in the game to present new opportunities and shifts in the game.

Jamey: Both of those concepts (the long-term viability of the animals and the pizzazz of the weather) sound awesome. I tried adding weather into the original version of Viticulture, but I couldn’t get it to work. I look forward to seeing how you made it work.

I must admit it has little to do with the actual relationship of weather to farming. I essentially took an event card system, tied it thematically to weather (and used that as inspiration where possible), and went with it. My goal was to create opportunities, not sew destruction.

Why four expansions? What do you think each of these would entail? A new mechanic per or…? I would love to one-day release a big, epic Farmageddon with lots of expansions and a big tin box.

Jamey: These are all in the brainstorming stage, so don’t hold me to this. But the general idea is that at the beginning of each game of Viticulture, each player will draw a mama card and a papa card (or whatever the Italian words are). They’re your parents. They’ll each give you a special starting resource, an ability to use throughout the game, and the mandate that you follow their passion. Your papa may have an Italian restaurant he needs to pass down to you, or your mama might want you to take over her dairy farm and gelateria. Thus each player will extend their player mat based on those mandates. Each of the expansions will be playable without the mamas and papas, but the mamas and papas would tie them all together.

That’s just one idea. I also have an idea for the game to expand into vineyards around the world, possibly using 7-Wonders like player mats that give players different options based on their region. And I have a Roman gods expansion idea that adds a supernatural element to the game. So we’ll see–it all depends on if people want more Viticulture.

For all our sakes I really hope they do! I’m a huge proponent of the expansion business model. I think it’s a great, lower-risk way to drive additional revenue and a good way to keep your best fans happy. Days of Wonder does this very well. They are a big inspiration for me.

That’s it for today! Come back tomorrow to find out about Euphoria, which is on Kickstarter now. Feel free to ask Jamey any questions below.