A few days ago, Guru sent met a heads up to writer Adam Jacot de Boinod, who is fascinated with words that exist in other languages but have no equivalent in ours.

Coincidentally, I just bumped into this list of international retitles for the film The Sound of Music. Hong Kong's is my favorite:

• The Rebel Novice (Brazil)
  
• The Melody of Happiness (France)
  
• My Songs, My Dreams (Germany)
  
• The Melody of Happiness (Greece)
  
• Angelic Music Flies and Heard Everywhere (Hong Kong)
  
• Tears and Smiles (Iran)
  
• All Together with Passion (Italy)
  
• The Rebel Novice (Latin America)
  
• The Most Beautiful Music (Netherlands)
  
• Music in the Heart (Portugal)
  
• Smiles and Tears (Spain)
  
• Truth, Kindness and Beauty (Taiwan)
  
• Love Spell, Heavenly Songs (Thailand)

I highly recommend you check out my new blog, Phil Dhingra. It's more focused on business, technology, and design. I've been getting positive feedback from my friends on this one, and I see good things coming out of it.

Some highlights:

• Move where the puck is going: Imagine a world with no marketing
  
• Marketing Strat: Do not give me a reason to Google for alternatives
  
• What else can Google do to be less Evil?
  

It seems that if you hope to design things that cut to the heart of the human experience, you're better off drawing inspiration from classical stories and literature than contemporary work. Something that remains relevant hundreds or thousands of years after its writing is a better foundation for meaningful work than the latest tech blog post.

(ryskamp.org)

I can relate to that young mom whose sole purpose is to get the most number of achievements on XBox. She even plays games she doesn't like just to improve her standing.

There is something in our DNA that attunes us to lists. A to-do list is a game-changer for productivity. For example, if you give programmers a "bug queue" in an issue tracker, they will work twice as efficiently than if you bark out random things that need fixing.

Random lists appear in my life like little tumors. The most dominant one right now is the National Film Registry. Every year the Library of Congress preserves up to 25 American films that it deems "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The list has grown to 500 movies since 1989, and it's similar to the more well-known Criterion Collection. I've created a spreadsheet of all these NFR movies, and my goal is to one day have seen every single one on that list. In the same spreadsheet, I'm keeping track of how many films my friend has watched, so there's a little competition underway. The very act of creating this spreadsheet spurred me to double the number of films I saw over the span of a month.

Unfortunately, my buddy has been lagging behind as he objected, "doesn't it make film-watching like homework?" But I like the homework aspect. The most recent film I saw, El Norte, followed a pattern similar to how I've watched a lot of those films. First the film starts off slow, and I'm questioning myself, "why am I watching this??" But then it picks up, and starts to click. By the end of the film and after the wikinoument, the whole process becomes an exercise in film appreciation.

El Norte is one of the rare films that appears on both the Criterion and the NFR lists. It's about immigrants from Guatemala crossing the United States border. What I love about the film is how organic and natural the plot is. There were at least ten points where I expected the film to take a cliche'd turn ("Oh, this is where she gets forced into prostitution," or "Oh, this is where they get robbed") but the film kept chugging along an indeterministic path, much like life.

The film's lasting impact, though, will be on how it has instructed my understanding of Mexican immigrants. One of the most indelible scenes has the main characters crawling through a narrow drainage tunnel and being attacked by rats.

The next day after watching El Norte, I couldn't look at Mexican workers the same way again.

On the eve of 2010, we should take stock of our notion of the Internet. The Internet is no longer considered "young" or in its "early" phase. It has a storied history now and it has a graveyard. Because of this, we can describe current Internet technologies with metaphors of Internet past.

Which leads to the conversation topic du jour: Twitter futurism. Is Twitter a fad? Will Twitter ever make any money?

On the lower-bound, perhaps Twitter could end up like Instant Messenger or Bulletin Boards, which have been perennial targets for monetization with little to show for it. Or will Twitter become the next Facebook or Google?

Or maybe it is a fad, but a fad in the way that MySpace is a fad. MySpace is more like a fad-wave, built on a cascading excitement that is renewed every time your social network expands a notch. So when you initially join MySpace, you have like an initial six-month excitement cycle. But by the time month three rolls around, a group of your friends join, and they start their own six-month cycles, further extending your cycle by an extra month perhaps. Then by month three of their cycles (your month six), a group of their friends join, which extends your friends' cycles a month (and your cycle by maybe another month). Until you find yourself hanging around for a year-and-a-half until everybody you know has finally gotten the MySpace bug out of their system. And then the technology reaches some stable state, half of what it was at its peak.

I kind of feel that way about Twitter. Many users have their salad days with Twitter, whether its by tweeting many times a day, going ReTweet crazy, or fiddling with apps in some hair-brained attempt to squeeze a buck out of it. And then their excitement fades, but not before the Twitter population grows another order of magnitude, thereby keeping them in the game just a little longer.

For me, I've reached the point where I have hardly any new friends joining Twitter, and it's kind of in a stable state for me. Twitter is about as important to me as Instant Messenger or my RSS feeds.

Maybe it's because I gave Blade Runner a fresh look recently, but for some reason, I'm really digging these quotes that make frank comparisons between humans and robots.

From Air & Space interview:

We mean that something happened that no one predicted at the beginning of the Space Age. Our technological capabilities in some areas far outstripped our capabilities in other areas--we were able to build robots that are massively more sophisticated than what we dreamt of in the 1950s. Humans have not had a similar increase in capacity.

...

There's a flip side to it: If humans go, they'll need the endurance of machines. They're going to have to be able to resist radiation to the same degree that machines do.

...

Humans have great capability for problem solving and creativity. And when they're faced with something that's out of the ordinary, that they haven't trained for or plotted out in detail, they can often figure out a way to solve the problem.

...

On the other hand, humans are enormously fragile, and the space environment is instant death to us, while robots are quite hardy and becoming more so all the time.

From Macmillan Space Sciences Summary:

Humans have major advantages over machines in many areas, including mobility, manipulation skills, pattern recognition (e.g., geological evaluation of a site), robustness with respect to plan failures and system failures, selfrepair under broad parameters, capability to repair a multitude of other tools, and robustness in communication, to name a few.

From NASA Educational Brief [pdf]:

Humans are far more adaptable than robots and can react better to the unexpected. When things go wrong, humans can make repairs.

The act of comparing humans vs robots automatically makes the conversation a description of humans according to their efficacy as a tool. Even just saying, "describing humans" has a dehumanizing effect. But, this feeling of being "put in my place" so-to-speak is comforting, and at times, sublime.

I've been trying to dismantle the notion of the "liberal media" for a while now. I'm going to assume that in serious media studies circles, nobody really considers the media "liberal." To flip the whole notion on its head, I remember a study showing that Drudge Report and FOX News can actually be considered centrist; and that its only really a few magazines, like National Review, that are right-wing.

But is there some truth to the "liberal" label? While the GOP has been deliberately applying the label for some time now, there must be a reason it sticks.

My thesis is that the media's real bias is "populism." I believe this is inherent to mass discourse. In the case of American news, they need to appeal to the broadest audience to stay on the air. In the case of the BBC, they may go for populism as the only way to be relevant to the largest number of people possible. And if you use that frame of thinking, you'll find that FOX News's bias can best be explained by populism; it's just that they've chosen a conservative brand of populism as a way to segment the news market.

The reason the "liberal" label sticks is simply because populism has been married to liberalism since FDR's time.

In the fine tradition of predecessors like "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads" comes the new demographic moniker, "Whole Foods Republicans":

What's needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate "Whole Foods Republicans"--independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion. And yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)

What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There's no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation

(Michael Petrilli in the Wall Street Journal)

The Whole Foods CEO initially got a lot of flak for speaking against ObamaCare, but has the kerfuffle earned him street cred? I can see that. That could play well in Austin, TX (location of the Whole Foods Headquarters and also where I live).

I've had an iPhone for a year and a half and have developed apps for the App Store. I switched to the Droid a few weeks ago, and during my honeymoon period with the device, I wrote a list of 20 Things I Like About the Droid.

In the interest of fairness, though, here's the opposite list. And by "Droid," I'm referring to the total experience of Google Android, Verizon Wireless, and the Motorola Droid device. Because, most new and prospective Android users right now will be on the Droid with Verizon.

Android-Specific

1. Removing Apps requires too many steps. Actually, I shouldn't refer to it as "Removing Apps," but rather use the Android terminology, "Uninstalling Apps," which is appropriate because it feels like a more involved process.
   
2. No built-in screenshot button combination.
   
3. I miss the slingshot feedback from the iPhone when you scroll past the edge of the screen. Otherwise, when I have a list that takes up the whole screen, I can't tell whether my screen is stuck or there are no more entries.
   
4. What's up with all the buttons? The iPhone has one button and it's fine. What's especially annoying is the Menu button. When you're in an App, and you're staring blankly, hunting around for a feature, it finally hits you, "Oh, maybe there's something under the Menu button." Lame.
   
5. Along the same vein, the back button is ambiguous. When you press it, you wonder, "is this going to take me back a view, or exit me out of the app?" The problem is there's no consistent indicator as to what "back" means. On the iPhone, the back button almost always has a dynamic label indicating what you're backing up to.
   
6. This is not really Android's fault per se, but I dislike the lack of excitement and camaraderie that the iPhone has. I bought an iPhone around the same time that a lot of my friends were buying it, and I felt there was a lot of sharing of Apps and tips. I'm pretty much alone with an Android phone, and I have no idea what's good on the Market. I haven't had one of those, "Ooh, did you try this yet?" conversations.

Android Market-Specific

7. Not all apps are required to have screenshots. As a result, only about a third of the apps I check out have a screenshot. I'm really taking a leap-of-faith getting an app without even seeing how it looks like.
   
8. You can't really shop from your desktop. There's an Android Market website, but it's not comprehensive. When I had an iPhone, I bought about two-thirds of my apps from the desktop since I could more easily look at descriptions, reviews, and even videos.
   
9. Oh, and when you buy an app, it doesn't ask you for a password. There's probably a setting for this, but man, as a default, this is a major security fail.
   
10. When you purchase an app, there's a series of yellow warning signs saying things like, "This application has access to System Tools: modify global system settings, change Wi-Fi state, change network connectivity, change your UI settings." Every time I see these, I have an "Oh Crap" moment, when I just pray that the hive vetted this app thoroughly.
    
11. The overall quantity, quality and polish of Android Apps isn't as high as the iPhone. For example, the best Twitter app for Android is nowhere near as good as Tweetie 2 on the iPhone. And some of my major favorites on the iPhone, like the Kindle app, don't exist. When using Android apps, I sometimes get the feeling like I'm back in the Blackberry or Windows Mobile world—i.e. in a world where apps aren't made with passion.

Verizon-Specific

12. Call quality doesn't seem as good as on the iPhone-AT&T.
    
13. After having gotten used to Visual Voicemail for the iPhone, the lack of it with Verizon makes me feel like I'm using old technology. There's a Visual VM app that you can download, but you have to pay $2.99/mo. Fine, so I tried to do that today, and bam, got a message along the lines, "Sorry, but the service you're requesting is currently not available." Fail.
    
14. This is an obvious one: not being able to use 3G Internet while you're on a phone call. When I'm on a long phone call, it's like I'm in a digital cone of silence, unable to know if I'm getting any new mail.

Droid-Specific

15. One of the first major annoying things I noticed was that it takes much longer than the iPhone to charge up, especially when you try to charge from a computer. I've never had enough patience to wait for it to get fully charged when plugged into my Macbook.
    
16. The battery cover slips off intermittently, especially when trying to pull it from your pocket. This is a major fail in my opinion, and Droid probably shouldn't have shipped with this problem.
    
17. Proximity detection is not as accurate as on the iPhone. About a third of time when I draw away from a phone call, the screen remains blank. I have to then fiddle with the power button and otherwise fumble around.
    
18. Screen refresh rate is lower than the iPhone.
    
19. I was disappointed that there were no earphones bundled with the device. I tried my iPhone earbuds (both the 3G and the 3GS ones), and the buttons on them didn't work. I wish I could answer a call or stop a song from them.
    
20. I don't care that much for haptic feedback. It doesn't really add much to the usability, and what you get in return are these sensations that are like stings or little shocks. As a result, every time you press the screen, you have this subtle anticipation that you are about to tap something that might buzz you.

Overall, I'm very happy with the Droid. I bought it partly for business reasons, and partly because AT&T was dropping calls at my new place. There's many many things that the Droid can do that the iPhone can't (true to the advertisements). For example, I typed a first draft of this post on the Droid's physical keyboard, something I couldn't have done on the iPhone. So I really feel like I have a device that I can do some serious work on.

If Seth Godin's keyword is "extraordinary," how about I make mine, "spectacular." In particular, somehow make your product both a spectacle and usable.

Take for example Beatles Rock Band. I like how Harmonix spared no expense to re-create the rockstar experience. They could have easily given you a three-dollar mic the size of a toothbrush (like predecessors in the past), but instead they give you a sturdy-looking mic, a solid mic stand, and a shiny beautiful guitar. In other words, they added every little touch necessary to make their product cause a scene every time it's used.

All this equipment requires a big box, and as a result, the case is also an extension of the spectacle of the product. I was carrying this box down three flights of escalators in the mall a few days ago, and realized that that was the most effective advertisement ever. They should just pay people to wander the mall with one of those boxes—much more effective than an ad buy. I made so many parents mad, because as soon as I passed by their kids, they had to fend off cries of, "Ooh, Daddy look at that!"

Same with the iPhone. Same with the Motorola Droid. You want to build products that make other people want to say, "Hey, let me see that."