Ice Cream Wars

Imagine a beach on a hot steamy day. People are scattered uniformly along the beach, and on this hot sunny day they could really use a chilling and soothing treat. Luckily two ice cream vendors show up, loaded with goodies. We can call the vendors Ben and Jerry, or Haagen and Dazs, but let's call them Donkey and Elephant; no harm in that.

Donkey and Elephant establish positions on the beach, and customers start flowing. It quickly turns out that both carry the exact same merchandise and sport identical prices. With quality and price being equal, customers choose the closest ice cream vendor.

Let's examine our vendors' business opportunity. Elephant has positioned himself towards the right end of the beach. Donkey is to the left of Elephant, but still right of center. All the customers to the right of Elephant will spend their hard earned dollars at Elephant's, and those to the left of Donkey will do so at Donkey's. the customers positioned in between the two vendors will be split half and half. Hmm... Perhaps a picture can help. Let's depict Donkey's customers in blue and Elephant's customers in red; no harm in that.

Elephant soon realizes that he holds the short end of the beach. After a deep session of meditation he shifts closer to Donkey:

Sweet! Elephant starts dreaming about retirement as more coins pour into his pocket. But then, after the initial indulgence, he realizes that Donkey is still making more money than him. Unacceptable!!! He dips again into intense meditation and comes up with a daring strategy: he will venture farther left, past Donkey!

Life is good for Elephant! He is clearly the king of the beach. But what's that??? Donkey has just moved to his left, towards the center of the beach!

Donkey has regained the lead. Elphant ignores some customers and rushes left, closer to mid-beach, passing Donkey yet again...

At the end of the day our exhausted ice cream vendors have reached the only stable equilibrium: they stand back to back at the exact mid-point of the beach. The customers are split equally between the two.

The American political system is a two body problem, and is therefore rather simple from a statistical standpoint. While people are excited about one candidate or another, in the long term the democrats will win about half the elections and the republicans will win the other half. Any other solution is unstable.

Zzzzz...

(Thanks to David Meiri for the ice cream analogy)

Nothing But Air

This is what I'm currently holding in my hands. Yes, at these very moments, while composing this blog entry. Nothing but Air. Because earlier today I received a new laptop, a MacBook Air. It came with a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and most importantly with an SSD instead of a hard drive.

I haven't had much run time on it so far, but initial impressions are very positive. It's faster than the black MacBook, at least for web browsing. It's slim and light like a feather. It's spiffy, and it is absolutely stunning. It's expensive, but more than worth every penny that Google paid...

Mark the day on your calendars, amigos, for today is January 1, 0001 A.MBA.

Zzzzz...

Still Looking For A New Year's Resolution?

Last week my younger son Edan told me about a movie he saw, Kung Fu Panda (warning: possible spoilers ahead). Towards the end of the movie the protagonist, a chubby panda bear named Po, receives the elusive Dragon Scroll which holds the secrets of Kung Fu. He unrolls the scroll and discovers that there is nothing but a reflective foil inside.

You see, Dad, said my young offspring, the moral of the story is that there was no special sauce; it was the lure of a powerful secret that motivated Po to believe in himself and succeed.

Hmm..., I said. That's interesting. You know, Edani, that sounds like a good lesson to life. There really are no magical silver bullets; instead of seeking powerful secrets one should focus on believing in oneself and work hard to achieve one's goals.

No, no, Dad, said my dear son. You don't understand. That was just a movie, it wasn't real!

Believing in yourself and working hard to achieve your goals are precious traits. If you have them, cherish them. If you don't, you may want to consider giving yourself these gifts. You can't buy them in a store, though; rather, you have to create them on your own. Moreover, these are recursive gifts, requiring you to believe that you can create them and to work hard to develop them.

Zzzzz...

Today is Tuesday, May 15, 0001

It really is. Not A.D. (Anno Domini) or B.C. (Before Christ), but rather A.i., that is Anno iPhone. Indeed, the iPhone ushered such a profound change into my life that it split it into two: before the iPhone and after the iPhone. The Jan 1, 0001 A.i. date was set on Aug 29, 08 A.D. when this gorgeous piece of hardware became mine in exchange for (quite) a few green notes. And thus began the iPhone calendar (note that this calendar follows the usual convension of skipping the year 0000).

Sorry, Pope Gregory XIII, what goes around comes around; Steve Jobs did to you what you did to Julius Caesar.

Sic semper tyrannis!

Zzzzz...

The Operating Systems War Is Over

And the winner is... The browser.

Not too long ago it mattered what operating system one was running. The different OSes ran on different hardware, had different capabilities, and hosted different applications. Today's major OSes all run on x86 machines (Linux actually supports anything that contains some silicon --- except, perhaps, for Pamela Anderson); they all provide equivalent functionality; and many applications ship on more than one OS.

Web browsers are particularly ubiquitous. The browser is the great equalizer: the more data and applications migrate to the web the less the operating system matters. On the OS highway Windows sees Linux and OS X in the side mirrors, but the flood is raining from the cloud.

In the high tech world a ruling product does not lose to the competition; rather it is eventually displaced by a new technology that simply renders it irrelevant.

Zzzzz...

A Pinch Of Humility

When was the last time you headed out with nothing but cloths on you?

I can't recall the last time I did; too many years have passed since. Nowadays when I get out I always carry something on me --- at the very least a key, to make sure I would be able to get back in. My iPhone and wallet almost always join along too (in that order); the laptop when I head to work; sunglasses when I need to look particularly cool; several Kleenex tissues never hurt; a pen could come in handy; a water bottle in prudent moments. And the list grows...

How do we shuttle all these items around? We can hold them in our hands, or attempt to balance them on our heads, but these methods are somewhat limited and restrictive. Instead we typically resort to employing portable storage accessories such as pockets, pouches, purses, backpacks, and their like.

In contrast some Australian species (marsupials) don't require external storage accessories: they are naturally born equipt with built-in pouches.

You see, even this silly aspect of day to day life begs the question: is homo sapiens really the pinnacle of evolution?

Zzzzz...

Life Is Not A Game

The recent eruption of violence in the Gaza strip is far from being a game. On both sides of the fence people die, get injured, and suffer shortage of water, food, and medications; houses get destroyed, property gets damaged, and much more.

There is a different aspect of this conflict that is very much not "gamish" in nature. Let's consult Wikipedia's definition of "game" in order to bring this aspect into focus (the emphasis is mine):

Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interactivity.

Underlying the concept of a game is a set of rules by which all the players abide. This key characteristic is missing from the Gaza strip conflict; indeed, the two sides live by very different value systems. They either play the same "game" with different sets of rules, or engage in different "games" against each other. Either way you spin it, they don't agree on the rules.

In fact this is just one illustration of a more general problem. Different cultures foster different value systems, a divergence that is at the very core of many of the challenges today's global world is facing. Consider suicide bombing. Or blood feuds. Or female genital mutilation. Or... All these are legitimate in some cultures, but completely puzzling to others.

We may excel at games, but we struggle "playing" situations where the different sides live by different value systems.

Zzzzz...

Snoozers: A Community Service

Happy new year! And welcome to this blog.

This has got to be a joke. Blog? What blog? I'm writing a blog? Why? Why now? What will it be about?

Good questions, I'm glad you asked. Let's start with "why" and "why now". Well, I've been toying with the idea of writing a blog for quite some time now, and have long ago crossed the Threshold of Unjustified Laziness, i.e. the point in which one spends more time debating whether to do something than it would take to actually do it. Moreover, I recently made a big change in my life --- moved across the US to the west coast and changed employer --- so what the heck, why not change one more thing while I'm at it. Like my good friend Tomer who always chooses to go to the dentist when all hell breaks loose and the world seems to be falling apart; after all, if everything is so bad, just how much more damage can a visit to the dentist pile on? The incremental pain is simply negligible.

My new employer is this obscure company called Google (please don't send me your resume, I don't work in Recruiting). Google aims high, inspires its employees to tackle audacious problems, and strives to make the world a better place. In this spirit I will attempt to make my own contribution to the community by taking the problem of insomnia head-on. How so? By posting Snoozers: random thoughts that cross my mind. My pledge to you, the reader, is that if somehow you will manage not to doze off while waiting for the next Snoozer to be posted, you are guaranteed to be bored to sleep by the content of that highly anticipated Snoozer.

Oh, one more thing (no, I'm not Steve Jobs): I will be relying on quality rather than quantity. That is, it won't be the length of each Snoozer but rather its content that will cause you to submit to sleepiness. The Snoozers themselves will hopefully be rather short, hence necessarily incomplete. The assertion is that there is no need for perfect, whole, sound theories to make you snooze; my half-baked and often incoherent ideas should do the job just fine.

Ok, enough with this introduction. You should be deep asleep by now anyway.

Zzzzz...