Tuesday, February 08, 2005

ESPN Interviews Malcom Gladwell



Not exactly your typical ESPN interview, but ESPN's Jeff Merron interviewed Blink and The Tipping Point author Malcom Gladwell just before the Super Bowl and asked him to translate his thinking into sports references.

It's a great interview, and Malcom's thoughts and theories make complete sense in a sports environment. Here's a snippet of an interview question about what advice from Blink he'd give the Eagles:

Well, it would be slightly terrifying to talk to the players, given that I'm, at my best, 135 pounds. So I'd settle for an hour with Andy Reid. I'd tell him the story from "Blink" about Millennium Challenge, which was the $500 million war game the Pentagon conducted in 2001. It was an elaborate dress rehearsal for the Iraq War, with one side "playing" the U.S. and another team playing Iraq -- and Iraq won. The chapter is all about how that happened, and it focuses on a retired Marine Corps General named Paul Van Riper, who was playing Saddam Hussein.

Van Riper won by speeding up the game. The team playing the U.S. had all kinds of computer programs and decision-making systems, and experts on every conceivable problem. But when the war started, Van Riper hit them with so many unexpected plays so quickly that he forced them out of that kind of conscious, deliberate decision-making mode -- and forced them to rely on their instincts. And they weren't prepared for that. Van Riper, in a sense, went to the "no-huddle" against his much more formidable opponent. And his experience shows that being good at deliberate, conscious decision-making doesn't make you good at instinctive decisions.

That's why I've always been so surprised that more NFL teams don't use the no-huddle. It's not just that it forces your opponent to keep a specific defense on the field. It's that it shifts the game cognitively: it forces coaches and defensive captains to think and react entirely in the instinctive "blink" mode -- and when teams aren't prepared for that kind of fast-paced thinking crazy things happen, like Iraq beating the U.S. Andy Reid has to know that Belichick has an edge when he can calmly and deliberately plot his next move. But does he still have an advantage when he and his players have to make decisions on the spur of the moment? I'd tell Andy Reid to go no-huddle at random, unpredictable points during the game -- to throw Belichick out of his comfort zone.


Good interview. Great book.

-aB

MapQuest Gets Trumped by Google



Google launced the beta version of its new mapping service today at maps.google.com.

And it's amazing. Smooth scrolling, drop shadows, live scrolling and zooming. It looks very Apple-like in the GUI. And that'a a compliment.

Unfortunately, the folks who would admire this the most - people using the Safari browser on the Mac, won't be able to see it yet. The site currently only works for IE and Firefox/Mozilla, according to Slashdot.

But if you're on IE, you're in for a treat. Check it out here. Sorry, MapQuest and Expedia Maps, you're going to have to evolve.

Monday, February 07, 2005

New Details on Sony PS3 Processor



Holy Crap. That's what I said when reading these specs.

Sony, IBM and Toshiba today announced some of the details of the Cell processor that they are all developing in collaboration. The PS3 will be the first application of this new smoker.

Now I don't know what all of this means, but I do know that big numbers are usually good and that these are some pretty big numbers:

  • The processor operates at greater than 4GHZ.

  • The processor is capable of 256GFLOPS. What that means is that the processor can handle 256 billion floating-point operations per second. That's billion with a "b" and per second as in, well per second. The Pentium 4 maxxed out these days is around 20 billion, to put this in perspective.

  • They're 234 million transitors on the little chip, pictured above between the push pins.

  • The processors are coming off the assembly line for testing. In other words, they're real.


NVIDIA is developing the graphic chip for the new PS3, and we can only hope that it is being built as aggressively as the CPU.

Amazing stuff. Read about it here on IGN. Read a more boring version (yet more detailed) of the same story here on ABC News.

-aB

iPods Don't Have Favorites. Promise. Steve Said So.



I have always felt that the "random" feature on iPods isn't really random. Sometimes, it just picks really good orders for songs in my playlist. I know this is just crazy talk, but many others have felt the same way.

Some think that their iPods have a thing for Steely Dan. Or maybe Alica Keys. For mine, it was James Taylor, Ian Van Dahl and U2 (especialy after the iPod/U2 commercials started - think about that conspiracy for a second).

But after many moons of research and now a statement from Stevie Jobs in Newsweek, it looks as though the algorithms that Apple developed are truly random. No affinity for certain songs, artists or BPMs (Beat Per Minute).

Engadget's statement is that "People love their iPods so much that they look for patterns in the pseudo-randomness. It’s what we do, as humans." Guess that makes sense.

Or does it?

Read the story here via Engadget.

-aB