“The Goldilocks Enigma” vs. “The End of Mr. Y”

Yesterday I finished reading The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas and I started The Goldilocks Enigma (also published as Cosmic Jackpot in the US) by Paul Davies (thanks for your recommendations, readers).

The Goldilocks Enigma is essentially about modern physics. The End of Mr. Y has interesting detours into thought experiments, Victorian freak shows, homeopathy and Derrida.

The End of Mr. Y throws in a casual mention of the anthropic principle, while the protagonist interstitially picks an inner fight with the treatment of women in most religions. The Goldilocks Enigma starts off with a proper discussion of the anthropic principle, as set out in Brandon Carter’s 1960s paper: why do the laws of physics seem to be so finely tuned for the existence of life?

The End of Mr. Y has a character who is a lapsed theologian. The Goldilocks Enigma has a number of scientist characters who in spite of being supposedly atheists or agnostics, still find themselves drawn to the notion of the meaning of purpose of the universe, and ultimately to a concept of God.

The Goldilocks Enigma is vastly more scientifically rigorous than The End of Mr. Y, but contains a lot less trashy sex and no detours into self-destructive addictions.

The Goldilocks Enigma promises to discuss what the universe is made of. The End of Mr. Y sets out multiverses that are made of language. (And Thomas, I believe, has an essential insight here. Look all around you: your house, your street, your city would not exist if we did not have language. Without language, we’d live in caves and occasionally huddle around fires.)

The End of Mr. Y has a very cursory interlude on the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics: this makes me look forward to more of the real thing (to the extent you can do this without the maths, which I expect is not a lot) in The Goldilocks Enigma.

So, you see how it’s impossible for me to be loyal to either fiction or non-fiction.

Seven things that don’t work at the Molino Stucky Hilton in Venice

Consumer advocacy is not the first need that comes to mind when spending a weekend in a Venice blessed by perfect spring weather after deciding that once in a while it’s worth splurging on a luxury hotel. However, the Molino Stucky Hilton, a late 1800s industrial flour mill sitting in a quiet location off the beaten track (the Giudecca island, also home to the historic Cipriani hotel) yet minutes by boat from anywhere in Venice, beautifully renovated as a hotel by the Caltagirone group and opened with great fanfare under Hilton management in 2007, manages to disappoint on so many counts that at some point I started keeping a list. Call me a snob, call me someone who can’t appreciate the fine things in life, but here are seven ways a hotel can go wrong – and at the Molino Stucky Hilton, all seven are wrong.

7. Internet access, provided by Swisscom, is fast and reliable but offered at extortionary prices. Business packages are 24 hours for €27 or 7 days for €108; if you choose Economy access (bandwidth and data volume limitations apply), you can choose between 60 non-consecutive minutes within a 24-hour range for €12 or 24 consecutive hours for €22. During a three-night stay, I burned through three of the sixty-minute packages – I hardly ever used the full hour, mind you, which only left me the added frustration of not being able to carry any unused minutes over to the next day.

6. There is no turndown service for the night, unless on request. And even on request, there is hardly any turndown service – it mostly consists of the removal of some pillows to a chair or a closet, depending on the housekeeping whim of the day. Drapes were left open for us to remember closing on our own. For rooms that set you back between €400 and €700 per night (but you can also choose a €3,700 Tower Suite, should you be so inclined), I find it in extraordinary bad taste not to provide turndown service by default.

5. I’m all for the environment, and in principle I do sympathize with the effort to conserve water and not dump synthetic detergents into the Venice Lagoon. Yet, for the aforementioned €400 to €700 per night, I expect to have the option to keep the same sheets night after night, should I so desire, by placing a little green card that says “I’m green, don’t change my sheets” on my bed before leaving the room in the morning. I do not expect the default option to be that I’ll have to sleep in clammy sheets, unless I remember to place on my bed the little green card that says “I’m just not that into green, so do bother to change my sheets, please”. That is precisely the unpalatable choice that the Hilton management inflicts on any morally conflicted guests at one of its most hyped luxury locations, and probably elsewhere too, considering how much cheaper it is.

4. Suites and junior suites come with complimentary access to an Executive Lounge on the sixth floor. On inspection, however, this turns out to be a singularly depressing space, dimly lit with minimal amounts of natural light coming from gunholes on top of the walls, and reminiscent most of all of a narrow airport lounge at some minor hub. An inexplicably undrinkable orange juice is served, and Sunday newspapers only appear on Sunday morning after reminding the lounge staff that Sunday is, indeed, a day of the week when many newspapers are regularly published.

3. A beautiful swimming pool on the seventh floor of the building is surrounded by such precious few deckchairs that, on a sunny afternoon, guests start getting turned away. This may be indeed a structural limitation, yet it is not one that the hotel designers couldn’t foresee. Another rooftop solarium, perhaps? Deckchairs in the garden? It’s only May and you’re running the pool at full capacity – how many guests are you going to disappoint by July?

2. Ah, no pool, but at least one can get up in the morning and go to the state-of-the-art-gym for a good workout, right? (Remember the open drapes issue above – item 6. – and the fact that the sun does rise at a very early hour these days, especially for a weekend morning). Most people who work out are used to getting their workouts sometime between 6 and 8 am, right? Well, no such luck. The gym, which is described in the in-room Guest Services book as opening at 8 am, really doesn’t open until 9 am. Guests who show up in workout gear anytime before 9 are turned away.

1. Finally, the staff is spectacularly untrained and occasionally clueless. (With a notable exception at the spa, the only department where people were competent, experienced and friendly: if you need a beautician, ask for Ella). Almost everybody looked like they’d just shown up for their first day of work. A request for Earl Grey tea at the aforementioned Executive Lounge (item 4.) was met with an uncomprehending stare and two consecutive attempts at tea that were not Earl Grey. A pool attendant (5.), asked whether there might be a house phone nearby, gleefully answered “I have no clue”. Lapses in training, even at a hotel costing you the aforementioned number of Euros per night, can be forgiven; lapses in attitude will poison the guest experience to the point that a guest will only return under extreme duress. (For a well-thought-out philosophy of the hospitality business, I recommend Setting the Table by New York restaurateur Danny Meyer).

Back in the mid-‘90s, I had what I recall as one of the best hotel experiences in my life at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California. A stroke of management genius had led them to conclude that, when a guest spends that kind of money to stay at your property, you might as well throw in a few minibar drinks and Terra chips for free: it’s a little thing, and of course it’s not free because you pay for it in the price of the room, but it completely changes the tone of your relationship with the hotel bill. Unfortunately for us customers, the Post Ranch Inn method did not catch on, and almost everywhere we go we are still being charged megabucks for a bottle of water. (On the minibar issue, there must be a conspiracy among hotels that’s worth an antitrust investigation). My pleasure with the Post Ranch Inn experience was only marred, on my subsequent visit, by the loss of a digital camera with all my Hawaii pictures on it, accidentally left in the Post Ranch Inn restaurant and never found again. Still, years after my first visit, I rave about the Post Ranch Inn. Yes, that kind of boutique hotel is a different business from the large hotel chain business. But still, one would wish to enjoy some glimpses of good service, and good management, even when staying at a bigger place. The Park Hyatt in Tokyo, in my experience, had just that kind of magic sauce. The Molino Stucky Hilton doesn’t.

Will our government please take note?

Bill Gates is no stranger to Italy; in fact, he seems to be rather fond of coming here to sign strategic partnerships between Microsoft and public-sector partners, from Poste Italiane to the City of Milan, agreements that have yet to produce any visibly useful effects for us citizens and customers. Today, I would like to offer a useful Gates quote from a Q& A session before a recent Inter-American Development Bank conference in Miami, as reported by Reuters (see full speech and and Q&A here):

Chairman Bill Gates credited the Internet on Friday with making “phenomenal” inroads in beefing up government transparency, saying cabinet ministers in Scandinavia now keep little, if anything, private.

“The Nordic countries, with Sweden and Denmark, have really taken it to an amazing level,” Gates told a conference on Latin American government, ahead of an annual Inter-American Development Bank meeting in Miami.

“Whenever a (Nordic cabinet) minister goes out to lunch, you can see how much he spent for lunch and how much on the cab. It literally goes up (on the Internet) within a few hours,” he said.

He was referring to detailed postings tracking daily business on government Web sites, which include everything from cabinet ministers’ calendars to budgets and real-time accounts of the bidding for lucrative government contracts.

“Every bid that’s ever done, the bidders come up on the networks, you see the terms they offer,” said Gates, still referring to the new, Web-savvy operating procedures in places like Sweden.

“It’s a very open, transparent bidding process,” he said, adding that the “things about government that really count” were now accessible to anyone with a personal computer.

Mr. Stanca, likely future Minister for Innovation and Technology; Mr. Alfano, likely future Minister for Public Affairs: even if Mr. Berlusconi has candidly confessed that he knows nearly nothing about the Internet, will you please take note of Mr. Gates’s wise words?

In favor of wearing whatever the hell you want

We spend our lives, sadly, trying to conform to others’ expectations. It is good to confound expectations once in a while - all the more so if, like Angela Merkel, you’re over fifty.

Berlusconi returns to power in Italy

And I feel a little bit less Italian tonight.

If you love search technology…

… my colleague Gene Cook has a couple of job openings for a Finding Analytics Manager (25490BR) and a Finding Research and Testing Manager (25489BR) at eBay in San Jose.
You can see the job description for both by searching for the respective requisition code in the eBay recruiting site, eBayCareers.

The Dismal Science and women in the workplace

There are good reasons why economics is called “the dismal science“, one reflects upon reading The Logic of Life by Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist). It shows us why revolutions are rare, why special interests systematically prevail in politics, and why, rationally speaking, it’s hard to justify expending the energy to go out and cast your vote in an election (”Steve Landsburg goes so far as to suggest that if you want to change politics, you would be better advised to buy a lottery ticket with the intention of spending the proceeds on lobbying.”)

A chapter examines a number of experiments showing how racism emerges in the workplace, even with a level playing field (call two equally endowed groups of people, say, “green” and “purple”) where decisions are subject to tiny random variations, and how in real life company recruiters actually do categorize resumes into three buckets: “white and good”, “white and mediocre”, and “black”. The key here is to distinguish “taste-based discrimination” (which is irrational and self-defeating) from “statistical discrimination”, which Harford chooses to call “rational racism” in order to drive the point that it won’t go away if we don’t do something about it (”doing something”, in econo-speak, typically being about changing the incentive structure for decision-makers).

Yet, Harford misses the opportunity to apply his own findings to women in the workplace. Let’s try.

First of all, through the whole “division of labor and comparative advantage” spiel, he makes it clear that we don’t necessarily need to become much better performers in the office; we’d be better advised to start by becoming a lot less competent at domestic work, something I have already argued for. However, once we’ve rebalanced the housework, we’re still stuck with an inescapable reality. Say that eighty per cent of women, over the course of their working life, take some time out to bear one or more children. The actual bearing of the children is hardly outsourceable (surrogacy is forbidden in many jurisdictions, and adoption has its own costs and requirements on the parent’s time). So, first of all, we’d be well advised to keep maternity leave at a minimum, and to introduce a mandatory matching paternity leave for fathers. But how many men will vote for that? It’s against their interests, since caring for an infant child is notoriously much harder than hanging around the office water cooler.

The reality is that the individual woman will have less opportunities in the workplace regardless of whether she actually bears children or not. That’s exactly what Harford calls “rational discrimination”: and it doesn’t even take a majority of infant-bearing women to make this happen. It would probably happen, say, even if five per cent of women produced all the infants in the world, and ninety-five per cent remained childless. Because, you see, ex ante the employer has no way to tell whether a given woman is going to bear children.

Women fight hard against this structural disadvantage (for example, by getting more years of education). Yet, for the individual career-minded woman, game theory shows that the only way to become as attractive to an employer as her male counterpart would be to signal that she is not going to bear children, and to do so in a credible manner. As Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling says, “the ability to make a binding promise is very useful”. Unfortunately, about the only way to make this type of promise binding and therefore credible is to get irreversibly sterilized, and to show the surgeon’s certificate to prospective employers.

Unless you view this as a desirable social outcome, you have to agree on at least one of two solutions. It’s either compulsory paternity leave for new fathers, for at least as long as the mother’s maternity leave (or probably even longer, to compensate for the share of children born in fatherless households); or another way to change the incentive structure, such as quotas for women in congressional and governmental postions, company boards (the Norwegians are doing this), and most other jobs with perks.

I have come to be, personally, in favor of both.

Ten paths to Internet apocalypse, and its consequences

I am often attracted to dystopias about the last days of civilization. Yet there is a story waiting to be written, I believe, about what would happen if a chunk of civilization as we know it, the Internet, went down forever. Hard to imagine? Read about ten ways the Internet as we know it might die in this GigaOM post by Alistair Croll.

Of course, nothing much would change in the short term for the four or five billion people who don’t use the Internet today and have no prospects of doing so in the near future, despite the well-intentioned dreams of tech philanthropists. But a collapse and permanent unavailability of the Internet, after leaving the digerati temporarily inconvenienced by the end of the twitters that bathe their lives in the warm glow of a persistent friend-generated soundtrack, would drive people to dig out old fax machines from their junk closets, pay a lot more visits to their local post office, and stock up on stuff they couldn’t order online anymore. It might temporarily revive some old economy stocks, such as those of newspaper publishers (even if the immediacy and quality of newspaper content would be severely degraded) and telecom companies. (It is debatable, however, whether the volume of stock trading would keep up, given how information flows in global financial markets have come to rely on the Internet). It would spell the end of low-cost access to airline reservation systems. Over time, it would have much more far-reaching economic effects. It would destroy a huge variety of knowledge jobs and revive less skilled jobs. And of course, in the end, it would depress the chances for trading, innovation and growth for the other four or five billons of Earth dwellers, too.

The Internet was conceived with a lot of built-in redundancy, and is therefore very resilient. The death of the Internet would be a black swan - a hard-to-predict event with catastrophic consequences. Still, we have to take good care of the Internet. Because civilization without it, I reckon, would be a lot less fun.

The psychedelic roots of Portishead

Any band that takes ten years to come out with its third album has either dramatically run out of ideas, or has taken its time for very good reasons. After seeing Portishead perform at the Alcatraz in Milan on Sunday night, I am very glad to report that it’s the latter.

I’ve always thought that their music had a peculiar cinematic quality: it would make a haunting soundtrack to a 1950s noir, or a sci-fi flick, or (as my friend Max suggested) one of the better James Bond movies. As they unfurled their rich tapestry of sound the other night, it became clear that they are much more than a trip-hop band from Bristol. They’ve done their homework, so to speak. The same way Bill Viola is no mere video artist, but has become a scholar steeped in his Pontormo, his Wagner and his Zen Buddhism, Portishead have delved into the encyclopedias of our musical heritage, dug out a few distinctive and unrelated sounds that interested them, and remixed them to come up with something that belongs uniquely to Portishead, yet pays homage to those ur-sounds in our collective memory.

Their Milan performance was powerfully “in the flow”, as that of an athlete winning a race, and opened up glimpses into their psychedelic roots. Max said they sounded like the Pink Floyd in the Pompeii period. Pink Floyd, of course, didn’t have a contralto lead singer, and only occasionally collaborated with female vocalists (one would like, though, to hear Beth Gibbons’s cover version of The Great Gig in the Sky, now that I think about it). Texture, complexity and distortion are some of the attributes that link their music to the glorious era of progressive rock.

Their new album, called Third, comes out this month. To read more about its birth (and the band’s instrumentation, including the “lovely old harmonium” elegantly squatting in their studio, bought on eBay for £29), check out this article by Ben Thompson.

A History of Love, or why American marriage is loaded with so many expectations

Europeans find the American cult of marriage (and of the related rite of passage, the mega-wedding) somewhat freakish. We tend to get married somewhat later (there is no such concept as the “starter marriage” over here), and we divorce a bit less. Also, it seems to me that we do not load our spouses with expectations that they’ll be the exclusive source of intimacy, companionship, and fulfillment. That is for reasons both good and bad, as (I speculate) we are on average better at maintaining our pre-marriage friendships alive, but at the same time we tend to stay much closer to our family of origin, marital mobility being lower than it is in the United States - in much the same way people are markedly less willing to relocate for work.

An article published a couple of years ago by history professor Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, makes some interesting points about how Americans got to fold their expectations for bliss into one relationship alone, the one with their spouse. Of course, things didn’t start out that way: for centuries, marriage was pretty much an economic arrangement, period:

Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion. [...] From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.