Best bit from this short interview with Google’s Larry Page [emphasis mine]:

“When we started Google, we thought, ‘Oh, we might fail,’ and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, ‘You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.’ Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.”

I just had a bad shopping experience at Tabletools.com that I’d like to share with my readers and the Google spider, thus creating a top-ranked search result for the terms Tabletools.com and awful shopping experience. (Piss off a respected blogger and watch what happens to the search results for your business.)

Tabletools.com recently sent me an email announcing a store-wide 40%-off sale including a coupon code. I visited the site yesterday, browsed around, and then ordered several things after making sure that they were “in stock.” I filled out the shipping address and credit card information forms, and placed the order successfully. The whole operation took maybe half an hour of my very valuable time.

Today I get an email from Tabletools.com saying that my order has been cancelled because nothing I ordered is in stock. What is this, some kind of cheap bait-and-switch thing? What an unprofessional outfit. I urge everyone never to shop at Tabletools.com.

Choice bits from this article on the latest soap opera in France:

“On the record, at least, the Roman Catholic French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a believer in the institution of marriage, despite his highly publicized divorces … Carla Bruni, for her part, has said that ‘love lasts a long time, but burning desire, two or three weeks’ … ‘People always secretly hate the rich and beautiful,’ said Long Nguyen, the editor of Flaunt magazine.”

Flaunt magazine, I love it. Look, any woman whose vocabulary includes the word “polyandry” is OK with me.

“Can’t We Talk?” (condensed from: You Just Don’t Understand), by Deborah Tannen

Relevant article given my recent posts, Phone Conversation with the Wife, and Conversations with Women:

• A woman doesn’t ask a question to get an instant decision, but to begin a negotiation
• For women talking is a way to exchange confirmation and support; For men, talk is information
• Women approach the world as as a network of connections seeking support and consensus
• When women complain they are looking for emotional support, not solutions
• Women formulate requests as proposals rather than orders and make suggestions, not demands

These five points may explain why so many men go bald in their thirties.

Dreams: Night School, by Jay Dixit

“A dream researcher at the University of Turku, in Finland, Antti Revonsuo believes that dreams are a sort of nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios. This virtual reality simulates emergency situations and provides an arena for safe training. As Revonsuo puts it, ‘The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations.’ Revonsuo believes that by providing rehearsal, dreaming helps us recognize dangers more quickly and respond more efficiently. We don’t need to be aware of this rehearsal, just as you don’t have to recall exactly where you practiced your tennis serve in order to reap the rewards.

Sleep provides practice. People given brainteasers before bed dream about the answers. Math students are all too familiar with dreams about algebra problems. Anyone who’s ever played too much Tetris knows you can start having Tetris dreams.”

Oh god, don’t remind me of the dreaded Tetris dreams. The threat theory makes sense but of course dreaming doesn’t serve a single purpose. One dream I still remember from high school: a girl I had a crush on gave birth to a handgun. What was that a rehearsal for, Antti?

Interesting malapropism from Michael Chiklis during his interview with Terry Gross:

“I shaved my head in male-patent baldness at 20 years old.”

Those of us suffering from male pattern baldness are deeply jealous of how good Chiklis looks bald. I’ve only seen season one of The Shield but I liked it a lot.

Key bits from Steve Jobs’s great commencement address at Stanford in 2005:

[Dropping out of college] was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

… much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

… you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

… getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Have any of you ever ridden one of these?

‘Guesswork’ forms big part in conjuring up a best-selling book, by Shira Boss

Does anyone know what percentage of sales or profits (?) an author typically gets under “standard contract terms” ?

To make money, the industry depends on perennial sellers and on best sellers. It is not so much the almost sure-fire best sellers by the well-known authors, because those cost so much to acquire and market, but the surprise best sellers. Those include books like “Prep,” “The Nanny Diaries” (bought for $25,000, it sold more than four million copies), “Marley and Me” (bought for $200,000, sold 2.5 million copies) and “The Secret” (bought for less than $250,000, sold 5.25 million copies in less than six months).”

How much money did the author of “Marley and Me” make in addition to the $200,000 advance if the book did $5 million in sales? Any guesses?