Pithy Title Here

Dear readers, I eat lunch at home some days when I don't get the dog sitter. This is mainly to allow my dog to relieve herself. I mean, I know the feeling of being trapped in a car when nature calls. A cage must be worse. Anyhow, on Friday, when I came home for lunch, I had a postcard to mail and as I was walking out to the mailbox I saw the mailman driving up. Perfect timing. In more ways than one. Had I not been out there right then, I doubt I would have discovered (at least for another few days) the Siamese cat that was under one of my bushes. I wondered what was making all the rustling noise and I walk over to see this poor thing camping out under a shrub. Important side note: I am allergic to cats. I don't mean the dander makes me sneeze. I mean cats make my head explode into a drippy, teary mess. Some years ago, a friend's cat fell out of her arms and the cat, desperately trying to arrest its fall, grabbed onto the closest thing it could... my thigh. Where c...

I read a fair amount of pop-econ and pop-psych. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell's excellent books, such The Tipping Point , and recently, Outliers . I recently read Chris Anderson's Free , breaking down the potential of companies (or bands) to make money by giving stuff away. It's interesting to see some topics arise in several of these books and one I've seen in the above - and in some other articles lately - is Dunbar's Number . In basic terms, Dunbar's Number is 150 - being the maximum size of a given person's true social network. The number was established through research... of course there is some dispute that 150 is the number, but, Dunbar did notice some interesting things. You can find plenty of examples through history of societies that broke apart into two groups when their total populations exceeded 150. Roman army units were made up of 150 soldiers. The idea is that, once you exceed 150 people in a group, cohesiveness - or common mutual int...

Way back in the day, when I was in college, I took a media criticism class. You encounter some crazy stuff in media criticism. There are some folks who think every ad you see contains veiled sexual allusions. Another set of crazies think that all media is designed to protect the bourgeoisie from the workers of the world (Yes, there are Marxist media critics). But one book we read in that class wasn't nuts. It was by Joseph Turow and titled Breaking Up America . Bear in mind that, in 2000, there was no YouTube. Streaming video was something you watched on a clunky player called RealPlayer . There were no iPods . You still - GASP - had to use CDs , unless you were using Napster or the more covert Scour Media Agent to download one 128 kbps mp3 at a time which you only - ONLY - played through Winamp . There wasn't a Blogger yet. The Internet , as wonderful as it was, was barely showing its true power. With that context in mind, understand how Breaking Up America worked. ...