1. Parasitoid larvae in caterpillars affect the behaviour of moths: Found this as a result of my looking into ecosystem equilibrium. I am fascinated by how pests, parasites and plants live in fragile harmony: there is beauty in that fragility and in that harmony. I also like three-cornered hats and regulatory systems. Parasite hides in caterpillar, gets to plant as caterpillar goes munch munch, proceeds to protect said plant from said caterpillar’s future state. Something poetic and wonderful and almost psychedelic about that.

2. World in 2000 as predicted in 1910: Found at the delightfully-named sadanduseless.com site, a collection of drawings by a French artist on how he perceived life would be at the turn of the next century. Very instructive. I’m very tempted to see if we can’t start an opensource competition, Answers On a Postcard, asking people to submit their visions for 2100. Tim O’Reilly?

3. Learn to code|codeacademy : Interesting cloud-based selfserve approach to teaching someone to code. I’ve only looked at the first few exercises, classic scripting language stuff around javascript, but I do like the interface and the flow. I can imagine a time when the knowledge of a scripting language becomes a universal need, so anything that lowers barriers to entry is worth it.

4. SpaceChem: Been researching design-based games suitable for entry into the world of work. Minecraft seemed an early possibility. SpaceChem holds fascinating promise. But I haven’t really tried it out yet, need to move over to a linux machine for that. Like what I’ve seen so far.

5. Information is cheap, meaning is expensive: A George Dyson article in the European. Always interested in what he has to say.

Incidentally, I will only continue to do this if you guys find it useful. So feedback is important.

I love the web, and all the things it lets me do.

Take the Ricky-Tick Club in Windsor. Ever since I moved to Windsor in 1988, I’ve been hearing about the place. It started off as an R&B/folk club in a small upstairs room at the Star and Garter Inn, shown below, which appears to have been near where the Goswell House alleyway is today.

 

Then it moved to the Thames Hotel, down by the river, where the Old Trout used to be, and is now Browns. You can see the original hotel here, and below that a poster of the kind of people who used to play there weekly!

 

 

 

And finally, the club “settled” at the riverside mansion at Clewer Mead. I believe it was demolished to make way for what is now the new leisure pool.

Here’s a smattering of the posters you can find on the web to do with the Ricky-Tick in Windsor (while there were other Ricky-Ticks started in Reading, Guildford, Croydon and Hounslow, by the same team, it was the Windsor one that took pride of place). For the sake of historical relevance, I’ve included one poster that wasn’t for the club but for the music festival, held at Windsor Racecourse. It helps you understand what the times were about.

The list of people who played Windsor in the early-to-mid 1960s reads like a Who’s Who of the kind of music I listen to:

Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Wonder. The Rolling Stones. Eric Clapton. Cream. Bert Jansch. John Renbourn. Pentangle. Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. Peter Green. Fleetwood Mac. The Animals. The Yardbirds. The Moody Blues. Alexis Korner. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation. Donovan. Ten Years After. Long John Baldry. Elton John. Not to mention people like BB King, Bill Haley and the Comets, John Lee Hooker, Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

What appears to have made the Ricky-Tick Windsor special is that it was a showcase for fresh talent; many of the people and acts named debuted there, in terms of their first real public performance.

And now?

Nothing.

Well that can be fixed, can’t it?

For many years, I have planned to build a school in Windsor when I retire. A school that others can copy for free. I will still do that for sure. That day is coming closer.

Now I know there is something else to be done after that. A good concert venue, where budding talent of the future can show us what they’ve got.

Talent is timeless, as is music.

As the web teaches us about the past, it can help us with renaissance. Where renaissance is called for.

Music’s a good place to start.

Incidentally, with respect to the Ricky-Tick. If you have any memories or memorabilia about the place then please comment and share. There’d been some rumours of a book coming out, by one of the original founders, John Mansfield, but I’ve not heard of it happening.

Outsourcers are a bit like private equity. They make money by taking something over, ruthlessly and rigorously standardising everything about, and making money on the difference between the price they agreed in advance and the costs they actually incur post-cleanup.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s a business, like any other, providing something the customer wants, at a price the customer is prepared to pay, and usually one that is profitable for the provider as well.

It’s the same sort of thinking that pervaded firms when they had to decide what to own and what to buy in. Why firms used to focus on deep vertical integration.

It keeps the costs down.

Which is a good thing, isn’t it, keeping costs down?

Firms couldn’t be wrong. Private equity operators couldn’t be wrong. Outsourcers couldn’t be wrong.

Vertical integration coupled with rigorous standardisation was the way to go.

So the thinking was applied to systems as well. Integrate everything in sight, as deeply as possible. Standardise everything within the resultant monolith. Reduce transaction costs as a result.

Yup, makes sense.

Provided.

And it’s a big “provided”.

Provided we’re talking about steady-state. No changes.

In all these models, transaction costs are kept low because nothing is allowed to change. The firms of the early 20th century could mandate it. PE companies could enforce it. Outsourcers could demand it. Usually by deploying a simple mechanism: high tariffs for any changes.

And so it is with monolithic vertically integrated systems. Good for steady state.

But very expensive to change.

The world we live in is a world of change. Demanded change. Mandated change. Customer-driven change.

Steady-state transaction costs can be controlled, of course. But only in a steady-state world.

What is now needed is a means of managing transaction costs in an ever-changing world.

And that’s where the cloud comes in. Real cloud, not the zero-sum-game “private” porcine make-up.

There was probably a king on the throne of the United Kingdom the first time the phrase “keep fixed costs as low as possible, and let variable costs be driven by the market” was used. Keeping fixed costs low makes sense. Because the cost of change is usually the cost of changing something in the fixed cost bucket. Variable costs, by their very nature, vary according to volume.

Imagine you bought a fixed-price ticket to Paris. And, sometime after you bought it, the demand drivers and environment had changed, and you had to go to New York instead. Would you say to yourself “Well, I bought this ticket to go to Paris, and that’s what I will do, regardless of where I’m meant to be”? Or would you berate yourself for buying a fixed-fare no-changes low-cost ticket while knowing that things might change?

Sometimes I’ve heard IT people talk like that. “I have to try and get value from what I bought, even if it is of no use to me”. I guess this is part of what gets called Sunk Cost Fallacy.

I’m going to continue to think about this, just wanted to air some of the thoughts, especially since some of them are thirty years old.

But before I end this post, I wanted to bring up two more things: meeting scheduling; innovation. Because I think this fixed cost/variable cost dichotomy plays out well in those areas as well.

Take scheduling meetings. How many times have you been in a situation where it’s really important to get a particular bunch of people together, and the “system” spurts out the 12th of Never as the next available date? A strategy that relies on agent negotiations between Outlook calendars….

I’ve always considered this a strange phenomenon. If it’s important to keep fixed costs low, and if human time/salary is one of the biggest costs, then why pre-commit a high proportion of the time? Isn’t that creating a new fixed cost? What I tend to do is to hold on jealously to white space in my schedule for as long as possible, so that I can respond to changes in demand quickly and effectively. Of course there are some regular meetings, these have to be scheduled in advance. When someone plans a visit, meetings have to be scheduled in advance, to “lock” the event in…..otherwise the cost of travel should not be undertaken. But for most of the time, it’s best to keep the swing room. Knowledge work is lumpy. Peaks and troughs.

Similarly, let’s think of innovation, particularly innovation with a technological component. One possible barrier to innovation is the corporate belief in Sunk Cost Fallacy. The space to innovate is taken up by the long-term commitments within the fixed cost bucket. An inspection of the ratio between fixed and variable costs for each part of the estate may provide a proxy for the innovation capability of that part of the estate. Obviously it would depend on the cycle of investment the firm is in, the market conditions (steady-state or fast-changing), the market itself (a manufacturer of oil tankers is going to have somewhat different characteristics from a retail bank), a whole slew of exogenous and endogenous variables.

But despite all that, I am intrigued by the possibility that something within the fixed/variable ratio may be a simple proxy for the cost of change, and therefore for some part of the capacity to innovate.

Views?

If you’re particularly into bad news, there are many places that will indulge your particular interest today. This is not one of them.

Here, I want to spend a little time on things that give me hope for humanity, things that have an uplifting effect on me; things that remind me that I have much to be thankful for, things that make my heart sing with joy.

Like Todmorden.

 

Todmorden is a old Domesday-Book-mentioned market town that is in both Lancashire as well as Yorkshire (depending on which side of the Calder you’re standing), with about 15,000 people and almost as many ways to pronounce its name (though the locals apparently just call it Tod).

I’ve never been there. But I will. Soon. This post will tell you why.

Sometime in 2009, I’d seen coverage of something happening in Todmorden that intrigued me. Locals there had apparently agreed to work together to try and become self-sufficient from the perspective of food. Their initial focus was on fruit and vegetables, and the intention was to move on to grain, to white meat and finally to all the food types they felt they would need.

The article intrigued me; I filed it away as something to keep an eye on. And then promptly forgot all about it.

More recently, probably sometime in June this year, I’d read about a NESTA publication, a Compendium for The Civic Economy, and given the contents a scan. Noticed that Incredible Edible Todmorden was mentioned, decided I would look at it in detail later. And then promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, when I came across continued coverage in one of the Sunday papers. Third time lucky. This time I soldiered on. Of course, I had to get past the bad-news-packaging first, but that is now something I am a past master at. [Besides forgetting about things that don’t make it on to my daily to-do list.] I would connect you up with the Sunday coverage but there’s no point, it’s pay-walled away.

It’s an amazing story. A local food system, an “edible landscape”. Created as a community asset. Fruit and vegetables planted in public spaces: car parks, footpaths and pavements, graveyards, roadside grass verges, railway platforms, school fields, wherever and whenever possible.

Doc Searls, when talking to me about opensource a decade ago, used the term NEA to describe what he considered to be a key set of principles for such things: Nobody owns it; Everybody can use it: Anyone can improve it. The Todmorden story appears to conform to all three principles.

Food planted everywhere on volunteer time and expense. Food available to all. Over 40 “growing sites”. One in three residents actively involved. 600 fruit trees. “Egg maps” showing you where your nearest egg producer is (there are 50 of them). People imitating and adapting the campaign in other parts of the country, and abroad.

An open architecture, no real barriers to entry. Food available to all. For free. Imitable. For free. An emergent phenomenon, shared via stories, making use of otherwise decaying assets. With the distinct possibility of making people healthier, wealthier and happier. Built on communal principles, steeped in sharing.

How did they decide what to plant and where? Which spaces to use? How did the narratives form and grow? Has the health profile of the town begun to change? How is the “tragedy of the commons” avoided within the community? Does the community “police” itself? What about the entry of “foreigners”? There are reports that crime has fallen since the experiment began. Is there evidence of causality or correlation?

A community that has made the coin of the realm disappear from some of their transactions. Not just dematerialised. Disappearded. [Yes, I meant disappearded. With the extra d.]

What does that mean for incomes? For taxes and duties? What do the Grand Poohbahs and panjandrums make of all this?

After food, what next? How will the “system” be kept open? How will “trade” be carried out? [I am told that there’s a supermarket at the edge of town, and saw at least one reference to a new one opening within the town. How can this work?

There’s only one way for me to find out. Well actually there are a few:

I can go to the Incredible Edible Todmorden website, a treat in itself.

I can continue to read the rest of the NESTA report, and speak to the people there.

I can talk to friends like Steve Moore at Big Society, who’s bound to know how I could find out more.

And I can go there and talk to people there.

And even donate to the cause. Which I must get around to doing, I’ve been completely engrossed in the story.

More later.

Todmorden. A reason to be cheerful.

 

 

 

 

 

I never really knew my father’s father. Not surprising, really, since he died on 12 March 1959, when I was all of sixteen months old.

I have nothing that belonged to him. A few photographs of him, yes. Some memories, possibly false, heavily influenced by what I’ve been told about him since, primarily by his wife, my grandmother, who outlived him by nearly 50 years. She died in April 2006, a real survivor. I remember being sad when told she was going to die of a tumour….. in 1966.

I never really knew my father’s father.

And so, for the last few years, I’ve been running an experiment. “Forensically” reconstructing him. Using the web. And only the web. Primarily book and magazine extracts that make their weary way on to the web. Trying to see what I learn as a result, not just about him, but about the web as well.

It all started nearly four years ago with My Grandfather’s Teeth, a passage I found in a book I came across online. Here’s the extract.

I now have a copy of the book. The incident of coming across the passage gave me the idea that I would, on a regular basis, trawl the web for evidence of my grandfather’s life, and, based on what I found, reconstruct a profile of the man. [In turn, I hope the exercise would inform me about my father, whom I knew well and yet in some ways didn’t know at all: he died when I was 22, sadly and suddenly. And as I learnt about my father, I hope to learn more about myself.]

So here are some of the things I’ve learned so far:

So now I know that he died of coronary thrombosis, in Calcutta, on March 12, aged 65. I can assume 1959, given the date of the publication. So I also know that he must have been born in 1894 or so. I now know that he was Managing Editor of Indian Finance [yes of course I knew that already, it was the family business, he founded it, and I was its last Editor and Publisher. But the point is to reconstruct the profile using the web and the web alone]. I also know that some people thought he would be missed, and that he was a picturesque and patriarchal figure in the world of Indian….

What else? My father starts making an appearance soon after that, not in chronological terms, but in the sequence in which I came across the web spoor. Here’s an extract from the introduction to the Silver Jubilee issue of something, in 1953. Although the cover is illegible, I can surmise that it is a commemorative volume to do with Indian Finance, the family-owned journal started by my grandfather in 1928.

So now someone else thought that people did not sufficiently recognise the greatness of the founder of Indian Finance, this someone’s old friend and colleague, my grandfather.  The writer goes on to say: I do not know of any greater exponent of current economic and financial problems than Mr CS Rangaswami, whose place is now gradually being taken by his brilliant son Raju. [That’s my father, he would have been 24 at the time].

By finding the excerpt below, I can get an idea that my grandfather was considered a quotable expert on aspects of finance. Here he appears in a review of the silver market by the United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, in 1932:

I then learnt that when he arrived in Calcutta, he had just a couple of rupees in his pocket. That he stepped into a dazzling world of maharajas and magnates. And that he was picked by the late Maharaja of Darbhanga as his Secretary, as shown below:

This view, of his having very little money when he arrived, is endorsed by the snippet below, calling him a self-made financial expert. And I get further endorsement that he started the magazine himself.

I begin to form a picture of the man. And then I find out he is listed amongst those in the press who struggled for India’s freedom, as shown below:

I learnt that he spent time teaching people, and explaining things to them:

I learnt that his opinion was sought by government committees and appeared in research journals:

I learnt he was befriended by many people also held in high regard, and that they wrote for the journal:

I learnt that he was a man of some humour, some scathing wit, someone who liked playing with language. An unprovoked compliment. I do like that turn of phrase!

The idea that he had something to do with the freedom movement is reinforced in the snippet below, evinced in his friendship with the Asaf Alis, with Maulana Azad and with Pothan Joseph. Something else I was told, that he’d harboured and protected Muslims in his palatial home during the Partition riots, that statement assumes more significance when I see the Azad and Asaf Ali names here. But I shall wait to “discover” that properly. [I was named after one of his friends, Jayaprakash Narayan, JP to his friends. Apparently he was my godfather; there’s a photograph somewhere of me in his arms. But I have no memory of him, and what I know is what I learnt living in India between 1957 and 1980.]

So what do we have? Let’s see. Born around 1894. Arrived in Calcutta penniless. Worked for the Maharaja of Darbhanga as Secretary. A self-made man, founder of a respected magazine, living in a palatial home, his opinion and advice sought on many matters by governments and politicians, hobnobbing with maharajas and magnates. Was part of the freedom struggle. Assisted by a brilliant son. Died of coronary thrombosis in 1959.

Everything hunky-dory? Not quite. What about this, found in the National Archives here in the UK?

A player. As I look further into the archives, I find out about letters sent from Grosvenor House here in London, and from the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay. Letters asking various cabinet and board members to support Osborne Smith, to push back against Griggs. Here’s where it gets meatier:

So now my grandfather’s up to some intrigue or the other, appearing in classified documents, and there are copies of documents sent by him, but in the handwriting of the person he’s attacking. All this in letters from the head of the Police Office to the Director of the Intelligence Bureau. Hmmm.

And then Special Branch gets involved. [A bit cheeky of me, I haven’t yet proven to you in this post that PR Srinivas is my grandfather’s partner, but there is web proof of this].

And suddenly the Viceroy’s involved, with letters intercepted and returned….

That’s it for now. A lazy Saturday post, showing you how one can construct a profile of someone just using the web. Genealogy with a twist. Let me know what you think.

Addendum: Found evidence that he spent two months in the UK, ostensibly in November and December 1938. He wrote this in Singapore on his “way back from the UK”.